Balancing what’s hot with what lasts
There is always a payoff that people chase when it comes to food trends. The rewards are massive once you hit that sweet spot—your dish goes viral, you rake in thousands of pesos, and suddenly, everyone’s lining up to get a taste. Influencers hype it up, foodies flood feeds with tons of photos and reviews, and word spreads like wildfire. Businesses scramble to copy it, or even create their own spin on it.
But once something new, something hot, or something better comes along, you’re old news.
On another end, a longstanding food business faces a slow and steady climb—a long and arduous path before it can call itself a trusted name. But once it has that reputation, it’s not just selling food. It’s selling tradition and legacy as a top of mind choice for people, as a brand that has stood strong, long after trends have faded.
The former is more of a high risk, high reward, while the latter is a long game, built on loyalty, patience and trust. And while the most ideal outcome is to take the best of both worlds, only a select few can strike that balance.
Take Gang Gang Chicken for example. Founded by Joey Marcelo and Julius Necor, it was a pandemic project (July 2020, to be specific) borne out of what they call “a last-ditch effort to save our careers.” A spur-of-the-moment idea that was developed in three days at their empty restaurant, urgency, desperation, and strong survival instincts fueled the two founders.
“We didn’t leave until we had an idea to try–else we agreed to just disband and find our own ways,” Marcelo explains. “But the pandemic threatened our careers. F&B was truly one of the industries severely devastated by COVID. I can say that it was one of the times when the term ‘innovate or die’ was most relevant. Luckily, we found ourselves doing the former.”
After launching their cloud kitchen, which housed three concepts, the founders quickly saw the potential in one of them: Gang Gang Chicken. This came about when affordable Korean-style boneless fried chicken was at its peak, with students, office workers, barkadas, and even families shaping up to be its target audience.
“By November the same year, we decided to test the concept further and open a physical storefront along Visayas Avenue,” Marcelo explains. “We were surprised with the turnout! People were loving it and the business was getting decent sales.”
Following its initial success, Marcelo and Necor opened up the brand for franchising, which many were quick to jump on. To date, Gang Gang has 21 stores, and the founders are “grateful for the warm reception of our community.”
To know more about their recipe for success, Marcelo talks to Lifestyle Inquirer about their brand’s “secret sauce.”
What do you think has been the key to your shop’s staying power in a competitive food industry?
We’ve always stood by our banner: “Real taste.” We agreed we would never sacrifice food quality no matter what. I think people found value in that. Alam nila kung tinitipid sila and they do not appreciate that.
We’ve had challenging times when food cost was skyrocketing due to inflation, but we never entertained the possibility of substituting our ingredients or cutting down on the serving. We’d rather increase our prices than compromise our product.
Food trends come and go quickly. How do you decide which ones are worth experimenting with?
We’re really big on social listening. We encourage our marketing team to obsess over gathering insight, both online and in-store. Online, no doubt, leads—we scan TikTok and regularly nominate trends we think might blow up. Then, we look at our customers and get a pulse on whether some of them are either aware or starting to catch up on the trends we’ve nominated. Those that match, we build on.
Catching the right trend at the right time is very tricky. We try to catch it early and avoid trendjacking. This makes it riskier because you bet on something so early and with incomplete indicators. But you really never know which trend will catch fire these days. Some blow up with no logical reason.
So we encourage the team to really just always try. If the trend we picked fails to blow up, it’s okay. No work is wasted.
How do you balance customer demand for something “new” with staying true to what you’re known for?
Fearless innovation is actually one of the values we embody at Gang Gang Chicken. We understand that customers always want something new—that’s why we invest so much on R&D (research and development).
If you observe our menu, we constantly update our flavor options and introduce seasonal products. We believe this keeps the customers engaged with our brand.
What are some of your non-negotiables, no matter the trend?
Rebellious but playful. Edgy but funny. Daring but not offensive.
As much as we want our team to be adventurous and push it to the limit, we don’t want to cross the line. This is hard to balance because people truly have different tastes. Some things that people find funny might be offensive to others. To manage risk, we listen hard before we commit to something.
How do you future-proof your business, given that trends and customer behaviors are constantly shifting?
Active and deep social listening really is in our core. We want to be there early for trends and have our eyes on the next one before the current one fades.
To do this, we do not just limit our eyes and ears within the industry. We purposely look at other industries as well. We are all interrelated. Many times, the trend starts completely somewhere else and then gets to your industry as it snowballs. So we always have to be eager to know “what’s next.”
What did you learn from the trends that didn’t work out?
As the saying goes, “In hindsight, vision is always 20/20.” You really never know it was a mistake until you get the result. To us, as long as you made the best decision at the moment—you followed the system, you considered alternatives, and made the decision with conviction—you can only learn lessons when things don’t go your way.
So we review our miscues, identify what we’ve miscalculated, and use that as wisdom for our next project.
What advice would you give to other food entrepreneurs about balancing trendiness with timelessness?
“It’s better to just say sorry after than to miss the boat completely.” This is what we always tell our team. We encourage them to be proactive and not to overthink. You will never have perfect information at all, so just believe in yourself and trust your gut.
How do you see the chicken shop industry evolving in the next five to 10 years, and how are you preparing for that future?
We treated 2017 as year one for the category. This was the year when boneless fried chicken started to get validated and accepted by the masses. If you think about it, we’re not even a decade old! The industry is so young and we can see it only growing robustly in the coming years.
Couple that with research. We’ve seen forecasting huge growth potential for the F&B industry in the Philippines in the next 10 years. Of course, with this comes the threat of new entrants in the category. We welcome that.
After all, we believe that competition only brings out the best in you. We’ll always be “crazy” and never complacent. We’ll listen to our customers actively and try to predict what they want next. We’ll consume as much content and insight as we can and turn that into new menu items or content that will relate to our customers most. I guess we just won’t sleep!
