Pollo Campero Names Julio Sánchez U.S. CEO

A New Leader Steps In With Clear Marching Orders

Pollo Campero has a new CEO running its U.S. operations, and the hire says a lot about what the Guatemalan chicken chain thinks it needs right now. Julio Sánchez took the role effective immediately, the company confirmed Tuesday, stepping in for Luis Javier Rodas, who closed out 26 years with the company this month as Chief Operating Officer. Sánchez's mandate, as laid out by Pollo Campero, is specific: sharpen operational excellence, accelerate same-store sales growth, build brand awareness, and elevate the guest experience.

Why Swapping Continuity For An Outsider Is A Calculated Bet

Rodas leaves behind more than two and a half decades of work that helped plant Pollo Campero's flag across the United States, a tenure long enough to count as institutional memory in its own right. Swapping that kind of continuity for an outside hire with multi-brand credentials is not a move companies make lightly, and it reads less like a routine succession than a calculated pivot. The logic seems to be this: let the stability Rodas built stand as the foundation, then bring in someone whose résumé is built around operational discipline and sales-driving initiatives from outside the Campero ecosystem.

A Résumé Built Across Burgers, Pizza, and Fried Chicken

Sánchez arrives with a career stitched together from four of the industry's most recognizable names. He most recently served as chief operating officer of CKE International, the parent company behind Carl's Jr., and before that held leadership posts at Pizza Hut, Burger King, and Church's Chicken. That range, across burgers, pizza, and fried chicken alike, gives him firsthand exposure to a wide swath of quick-service and fast-casual playbooks: different menu strategies, different operational systems, different customer bases. It's the kind of breadth that appears to have been the deciding factor in CMI's choice, a signal that the parent company wanted someone fluent in the operating language of several established chains rather than a specialist in just one.

CMI's CEO Frames This As A Results Mandate

Jose Gregorio Baquero, global CEO of CMI Foods, put the rationale plainly: "Julio combines deep operational expertise with sound business judgment and a proven record of delivering results. He is the right leader to guide Campero into its next stage of growth." The framing matters. Baquero isn't describing a caretaker appointment or a quiet handoff. He's describing a results mandate, and the four priorities assigned to Sánchez (operational excellence, same-store sales, brand awareness, guest experience) read like a scorecard CMI intends to actually check.

Why The U.S. Market Carries So Much Weight

The stakes behind that scorecard are sizable. Pollo Campero, founded in Guatemala in 1971, now runs more than 400 restaurants spread across Guatemala, El Salvador, Mexico, Honduras, and Ecuador. The United States has become the standout market within that network, with more than 150 restaurants operating domestically, enough scale that U.S. leadership carries real weight within CMI's broader portfolio. It is a sizable base for Sánchez to work from, and a public one: any movement on same-store sales or guest satisfaction will be visible fairly quickly in a market this competitive.

Execution, Not Résumé, Will Decide If This Works

Whether the hire pays off will come down to execution rather than résumé. Sánchez's cross-brand background gives him pattern recognition across four different operating models, but Pollo Campero's identity, rooted in Guatemalan fried and roasted chicken, isn't quite like any of the chains he's previously run. The company has set the terms of success clearly: faster same-store sales, stronger brand recognition, a better guest experience, tighter operations. The next several quarters will show whether an executive fluent in Carl's Jr., Pizza Hut, Burger King, and Church's Chicken can translate that fluency into gains for a chain whose roots, and whose loyal following, run in a different direction entirely.

A New Leader Steps In With Clear Marching Orders