Courtepaille will be taken over by La Boucherie, 1,500 employees made redundant

2023-06-19 17:10:00

The Courtepaille brand, a “steak house” brand with a red roof and a family clientele, will continue. In receivership since March, the restaurant chain will be taken over by the Angevin group La Boucherie, which was the only candidate still in the running for the takeover, according to information from the Figaro. The Commercial Court of Nanterre must formalize this takeover this Tuesday, June 20.

Born in 1974 with the opening in Megève of a first restaurant with a traditional butcher’s shop decor, the La Boucherie brand has 130 franchisees in France and has a turnover of 8.8 million euros.

Some 1,500 employees made redundant

The owners of the La Boucherie, Bistrot du Boucher and Assiette au Bœuf brands will thus take over all of the 74 Courtepaille franchise restaurants, as well as 10 restaurants operated in branches. Some establishments will be taken over individually by employees, such as the restaurants of Gonesse and Saint-Brice-sous-Forêt, in Val-d’Oise, or that of Rennes-Pacé, in Ille-et-Vilaine. Others will be by franchisees, such as that of Brie-Comte-Robert, in Seine-et-Marne, or Ormesson, in Val-de-Marne.

However, this offer leaves a large part of the employees on the floor. The company has indicated the permanent closure of more than 130 establishments and the dismissal of around 1,500 employees. A total of 158 employees will be taken over by the La Boucherie group. For his part, the current owner of Courtepaille, Napaqaro – who himself belongs to the TDR fund – has offered to reclassify 512 employees within his other brands, Buffalo Grill and Popeyes.

Three other interested buyers

HIG Capital (Quick) and Groupe Bertrand (Hippopotamus, Burger King, etc.) were also among the interested buyers, according to information from the daily, before withdrawing. Their offers were only “piecemeal”, according to several sources, providing for the takeover of “one or a few restaurants only”.

A last candidate had expressed interest in a takeover. It was the entrepreneur Hakim Benotmane (Nabab Kebab). He had offered to take over all of the chain’s restaurants, but his candidacy had been dismissed by the court.

A previous takeover that had failed

Almost three years earlier, in September 2020, the chain of grill restaurants with a somewhat outdated image – rustic decor, wood fire and copper pans … –, already in receivership, had been taken over in the British fund ICG by Napaqaro, for 17 million euros. The offer of the latter, best-selling at the social level, had been preferred to that of Groupe Bertrand (Burger King, Hippopotamus, Léon, Au bureau …), number two in catering in France.

Carried by Jocelyn Olive, then at the head of Napaqaro – landed later – the takeover project planned to invest to modernize the sign and its network and to renew its concept in order to relaunch attendance. But this recovery might not be stimulated: faced with “serious economic and financial difficulties caused by the Covid crisis”, which then “worsened”, explained Napaqaro, Courtepaille had to place itself once more in receivership in March. 2022.

Struggled by the long periods of closure of the dining room service during the health crisis, then by the boom in home deliveries and the generalization of teleworking, the family brand has never regained its pre-Covid attendance level. : it was still down 25% in 2022, compared to 2019.

In addition “many employees left the company” during the health crisis, leaving Courtepaille “short of manpower: the services were not carried out correctly, which accelerated our fall”, estimates Pascal Zoublir, CGT representative of the company. “We warned regarding management, hiring, salaries that were too low, working conditions,” he said. “And the customers did not adhere to the tests that the management was doing: they removed the vegetables, the fish to make roast chicken… It was a disaster,” he adds.

Then Courtepaille suffered from soaring inflation, which increased the cost of supplies and raw materials and forced its customers, families on tight budgets, to make choices in their consumption.

Born in 1961 and flourishing in the 1970s and 80s, the restaurant brand, often located on the edge of motorways and sometimes quite isolated, still achieved an annual turnover of 190 million euros in 278 restaurants before the health crisis. , employing 4,000 people.

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