The best and biggest: Can GYG continue to disrupt fast food?

Can Guzman Y Gomez continue to disrupt the fast-food industry as it grows globally to achieve its mission to be the biggest and the best?

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA - NewsWire Photos JUNE 25, 2025: Guzman Y Gomez founder Steven Marks and CMO Lara Thom in Sydney on Wednesday. Picture: NewsWire / Nikki Short

Guzman y Gomez, the Mexican-inspired fast food chain started by an American in Australia, wants to disrupt the global restaurant market and overtake McDonald’s to become the best and the biggest.

It’s an ambitious goal, even for the $2.9bn listed company, which has become the poster-child for disruption in the fast food industry by flipping the switch on the standard quick service restaurant (QSR) formula by focusing on fresh food at low prices.

The business, which opened its first restaurant in Sydney’s trendy inner-city Newtown in 2006, currently operates 257 stores across Australia, Singapore, Japan and the US and this year broke the billion dollar revenue mark. Locally, GYG continues to outperform the overall QSR category, reporting 9.4 per cent sales growth, while the category declined.

The Mexican-inspired fast-food business is not shy about its plans to become No 1 – it wants to open 1000 restaurants across Australia, and continue to grow its presence in Singapore and Japan, where it currently has five and 21 restaurants, respectively.

GYG also wants to keep expanding in the US, where it will open its seventh restaurant soon and plans to have 15 in the next few years.

The ambitious growth strategy is unsurprising to anyone who has spent time with GYG founder and co-CEO Steven Marks. The native New Yorker is bursting with passion and infectious ambition, which, along with a laser focus on quality and customer experience, has been embedded into every layer of the brand and product.

“GYG is fast food for this generation and you can see that in our revenue growth and our comp sales growth – the numbers don’t lie,” Mr Marks told The Australian. “We only have 250 restaurants, that’s it. McDonald’s has 30,000, Chipotle’s got 4000. So we’re really just getting started, even though it’s been 20 years, it’s just the beginning,” he said.

GYG’s growth strategy is grounded in its commitment to fresh food and the business claims to be the nation’s biggest buyer of avocados, Roma tomatoes and free-range chickens. Mr Marks has focused on ensuring that all of GYG’s food and ingredients have no added preservatives, artificial flavours, colours or “unacceptable additives”, all while maintaining great flavour and taste.

He’s passionate about this ­positioning and ensuring the brand is transparent about its food and ingredients.

“The foundation of GYG since day one is that we will never, ever compromise on the quality of our food or our people,” he said.

This focus is evident in the business’s unwavering focus on the customer experience and the role of its culture within that. GYG’s onboarding process sees every new employee, regardless of their title, spend three days working in service in one of the restaurants. The aim is to ensure that everyone in the business has an appreciation of the customer experience, said GYG chief marketing officer Lara Thom.

“It gives you an absolute appreciation of how hard the frontline teams work, and it gives you an insight into who we work for, not who works for us.”

Ms Thom has been with the business for almost a decade and runs a 40-strong marketing department with an in-house advertising agency model that enables the business to pivot and react in real time to market dynamics to engage with consumers.

While she credits Mr Marks as the brains behind some of the brand’s most successful marketing taglines such as “Clean is the new healthy”, and “GYG is fast food your mom says yes to”, both of which are direct quotes from him, she’s crafted a global marketing strategy that not only optimises and amplifies the brand values but ensures those values are embedded in every touch point of the consumer experience.

“Clean for us was not a food trend or a campaign, it was our philosophy on food and we just happened to amplify a message that was core to our business,” she said.

“A lot of brands have their moment in the sun and then they grow up and they grow out of the demographic that they first appealed to.

“The strength of GYG is knowing exactly who we are and who we’re not. And that means we will always ensure that we appeal to the generation of now, and I think that’s really crucial. Our strategy is to constantly appeal to that generation so that once we have someone who loves the brand, they will grow with the brand.”

To achieve this, GYG has worked to ensure it turns up within people’s lives, from sponsoring school sports programs to its restaurants at university campus, and its integration with food delivery platforms, where GYG burritos rank as one of the most delivered products in Australia, as well as its own GYG app, which accounts for 21 per cent of GYG’s total revenue.

“Other brands have their moment in the sun but they don’t have a long-term strategy or ­vision. They focus on chasing revenue today, or this week, or this quarter, or next year, but the ­vision of what the brand needs to be in 20 years hasn’t been set. They’re so busy banking the dollars now, they’re forgetting about what’s next. For us, it’s very clear what’s next and what the future brings because the brand is clear,” said Ms Thom.

Mr Marks agrees. “We have a saying, ‘Are you good enough to get better?’ At GYG, everything’s about hunger, humility and curiosity. What you see in a lot of these big traditional players, they’re so arrogant and they’ve become very complacent. For us, everybody’s on the same bonus plan, the same long-term incentive plan, this is a high-performing team,” he said.

GYG’s impact on the market is unmissable, but with such significant and ambitious growth plans, can the Aussie-grown business continue to shake up a category that it has already disrupted?

“Disruption isn’t something we think about, it is part of our DNA,” said Ms Thom. “It’s part of our mission, the vision, the values of the company and the business.

“It’s quite easy to latch on to that because it permeates through­out the entire company.”

“We’ve transcended being an Australian brand and we’re now a global brand that just happened to start in Australia.”

Mr Marks agrees. “That’s what people can’t get their heads around; even as a public business, people say, how can this thing be worth $3bn? They don’t realise, man, this is going to be the best and biggest.”