BUSINESS BITS

Fiesta favorite
JET RAMOS

Bibingka, the traditional mainstay of the Philippine holiday table, is making a major comeback in the consumer food market. Several entrepreneurs have made the centuries’ old native delicacy commercially available in major malls and leading food establishments. They are applying modern food preparation and marketing techniques to whip up year-round demand for the product and revive the Filipino’s fondness for the native delicacy.

A frontrunner in the commercial revival of bibinka is Sonny Francisco, grandson of the late musician Ceferino Francisco, founder in 1938 of a family-owned enterprise that was to become Ferino’s Bibingka. Sonny, an architect by profession, inherited his parent’s strong attachment to the product and carried on with the family business. Today, he owns and manages all of the Ferino’s Bibingka outlets in Robinsons malls, while his siblings own and manage the Ferino’s Bibingka outlets at Metroeast in Pasig City, SM Mall of Asia in Pasay City, Market! In Taguig City, and Shopwise in Pasig, Manila and Makati City.

“My grandparents started the business as a small restaurant in Pritil, Tondo, called Ferino’s Café,” says Sonny. “They decided to serve bibingka as their specialty because during that time, a lot of people would ask for it so often, especially during holidays. The couple then bought clay pots and the other cooking utensils for making bibingka. They experimented with various rice, egg, and sugar mixes until they developed what come to be known as Ferino’s galapong (glutinous rice mix), which to this day remains the family’s trade secret.”

The unique galapong mixture became the restaurant’s major attraction, making Ferino’s café hugely popular through word of mouth. What used to be a regular delicacy that the Francisco couple sold to neighbors and friends became the talk of the town, making many major personalities and politicians of the time into regular customers of the restaurant. In fact, so popular did their bibingka become that in time, the Francisco’s moved their restaurant to the Manila Hotel in the late 1960s where they renamed it as Ferino’s Bibingka.

When Sonny’s grandfather passed away in 1975, however, Ferino’s Bibingka lost its allure and eventually closed down. It was only in 1982 when Sonny’s father, Alfredo Francisco, revived the business, opening his first Ferino’s Bibingla outlet in Baclaran, Pasay City, in front of the Redemptorist Church. Later, because the malls had by then become the Filipino’s favorite shopping destination, Sonny’s father brought the business to the SM Centerpoint, Megamall, North Edsa and Southmall. He invested about P200,000 for stall rentals at the SM mall and another P100,000 for putting up a takeout counter along Makati Avenue in Makati City. Because his outlets had such good locations and bibingka had by then become popular even to the upscale market, he recovered his investment in less than a year.

A major concern of Sonny Francisco in running the business he had inherited is to continuously improve product and customer service without losing the core concept of bibingka as a native delicacy. “We need to balance novelty and the changing customers’ preferences,” he says. “Also, there are limitations in the manner we can prepare our product in the different locations where we do our business, so we have to consider those limitations in the cooking process.”

For example, he explains, the traditional way of making bibigka is to cook it on a cooking plan with hot coal placed both on top and underneath the pan. But since most food establishments have stringent safety regulations and customers are always in hurry, Ferino’s Bibingka is often constrained to use electric ovens instead of charcoal embers to cook the product. “For safety’s sake, we have to use the electric ovens particularly in supermarkets that have low ceilings and are thus unfit for charcoal cooking,” he explains. “Wherever as possible, however, we use the basic cooking elements like clay pots and charcoal in cooking our bibingka.”

Aside from selling bibingka in local malls, Francisco plans to export the product to Filipino communities abroad. For this purpose, he had arranged for the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) to test the shelf life of his sealed frozen bibingka. It was determined that the product could last for at least a year, which therefore makes it viable for export.

Another major initiative undertaken by Francisco is franchising Ferino’s Bibinka in food carts that serve the product in a smaller size. The variant is called “Bibingcute by Ferino’s,” more affordable bibingka but with precisely the same taste and texture as the regular-size product.

“With only P150,000, you can get started in the franchised bibingka food cart with all he says. “The cart comes complete with all the necessary equipment and supplies, and if you have a good location for your food cart, you can recover your investment in as short a time as twelve months.”
The chief executive officer of Philippine Food Asia Corp., Richard Sanz, is very fond of bibingka as well as of the bibingka product that he had developed: Bibingkinitan! mini-bibinka. The brand conjoins the words “bibingka” and “balingkinitan,” which is Tagalog for “petite,” and together they mean “bite-size bibingka.”

Sanz says that he developed that product after realizing that most people find it difficult to finish a whole bibingka, which traditionally is big enough for several people. He therefore though that there should be a market for bibingka in smaller servings – hence his bibingkinitan idea.

“I was already in the business of selling iced tea in malls when I started Bibingkinitan in April last year,” says Sanz. “My initial investment in Bibingkinitan was P100,000, which went into the construction of the cart, signage, and equipment. Before that, it took me a year doing research and development to prefect our moist-and-soft bibingka recipe.”

Sanz manages Bibingka in much the same way he manages his iced tea business. To get it started, for instance, he did practically everything himself, including ingredients; the delivery of supplies; and the graphic design, marketing, operations, and accounting. When initial sales turned out to be low, however, Sanz quickly changed his marketing strategy. He put up big Bibingkinitan posters that positioned his bibingka as the softest and most moist there was. He also did flyer distribution and product sampling to help promote his bibingka.

Recalls Sanz: “My wife and a took turns in operating our first outlet at the Alabang Town Center in Muntinlupa City, which one staff helping us in tending the store. During the first weeks of operation, we made it a point to both experience actual cooking and selling to the customers.”

With good logistics management as well as sustained mall advertising and free food tasting, the Bibingkinitan business has grown very quickly. By also going into franchising, it now has a network of 19 outlets in Metro Manila and nearby provinces after less than a year in operation. Of these, 10 are company-owned and the rest is franchised outlets. “We hired a franchise consultant to develop a franchise system for us, and now we are ready to go nationwide and open 10 more new outlets by the middle of this year,” says Sanz.