Chipotle Mexican Grill has appointed Sabir Sami to its board of directors, adding a career restaurant operator with sixteen years of international scale experience to a board that has been weighted towards consumer marketing and finance.
The company disclosed the appointment in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which recorded that the board had increased its size from ten directors to eleven and elected Sabir Sami to the new seat with immediate effect. The board determined that he is independent under the listing standards of the New York Stock Exchange. He has not been assigned to a board committee.
Sami spent sixteen years at Yum! Brands, the owner of KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell. He ran the KFC Division as its chief executive for three years before stepping down in the early part of last year, and before that served as the division chief operating officer and as managing director of KFC Asia. He founded the consultancy Sami Advisory the following August. His career before Yum! Brands was in consumer goods, at Procter and Gamble, The Coca-Cola Company and Reckitt Benckiser.
The fit is a specific one rather than a general one. KFC is the most internationally distributed of the large American restaurant brands, with the great majority of its restaurants outside the United States and a franchise model that has had to work across very different markets. Chipotle, by contrast, has built almost its entire business on company owned restaurants in North America, and its international footprint is small and recent. A director who has run a global franchise system at scale is a direct answer to the question the company faces next.
That question has become more pressing. Chipotle has spent the past two years opening restaurants at a faster rate than at any point in its history while facing slower growth in transactions at established restaurants, which is the combination that normally pushes an American restaurant group to look abroad. The company has taken early steps into the Middle East and Europe through franchise partners rather than owned operations, which is precisely the model Sami spent his career running.
The appointment also continues a pattern in restaurant boardrooms of recruiting operators from rival groups rather than from outside the sector. Chipotle and Yum! Brands do not compete directly in most categories, which makes the move straightforward from a governance point of view, and the board has gained a member who has sat on the other side of the franchise table.
The board now has eleven members. Chipotle will report its next set of quarterly results later in the year, and Sami will stand for election by shareholders at the annual meeting next spring.
