Udon closes 2023 with 50 million in turnover and more than 70 restaurants

The Asian food restaurants Udon will close this year increasing their turnover again. They will reach 50 million euros, five more than in 2022. They will do so in a year in which the chain has developed a multitude of initiatives in favor of sustainability, ranging from chopsticks to containers for take away, including paper placemats.

These placemats are still disposable, but their dimensions have been reduced to lower waste generation. Not only that, but Udon has devised a campaign to give them a new use: it proposes to its customers to convert them into origami cranes, through a video tutorial accessible from the placemat itself. The cranes are also charitable. For each one that the customer leaves at the premises to hang on a Christmas tree after writing a wish, one euro will be donated to the organization Aldeas Infantiles.

The proposal of the Asian restaurant chain comes from an ancient Japanese legend. According to the legend, anyone who makes a thousand paper cranes will receive a wish. With this story as inspiration, Udon has launched this initiative coinciding with the holiday season. To boost the campaign, which will last throughout December, the company has collaborated with an entity that employs people with intellectual disabilities. The Barcelona-based company has done so with a wish: to contribute its "grain of rice" to move towards a better world.

Its commitment to this better world encompasses what the company calls the "three P's": people, product, and planet. With these three concepts as a base, the company "has sustainability in its DNA from day one", according to Udon co-founder and CEO, Jordi Pascual. He recounted this at a meeting with journalists who assembled their own origami cranes, which took them no less than 20 minutes.

The cranes took shape, not without difficulty and with repeated corrections, on tables adorned with everything necessary to enjoy an Asian banquet, including the indispensable chopsticks. One more element that Udon has approached from a sustainable perspective. After a long process with many tests of various materials, in September the company replaced the previously single-use wooden chopsticks with reusable chopsticks.

A small change of a small detail in a restaurant; a big impact globally for the chain, which has more than 70 restaurants in five countries, taking into account its own and franchised locations. Until this change, they generated 5.2 million chopsticks annually, used by nearly three million diners. Lining up all these chopsticks, one could reach from the first location the chain opened in 2014, in Born, to the one it has in another city separated by more than 1,000 kilometers: Lisbon.

All these measures have been compiled in a sustainability report, as explained by Isabel Cordech, specialist in sustainable restoration and founder of Te lo Sirvo en Verde. The document also reflects the company's progress in offering products from sustainable agriculture, certified sustainable aquaculture fish, and plant-based protein, as well as other initiatives.

These range from the replacement of cleaning products in the premises to ensuring that takeaway food containers are not only recyclable, but compostable. "Sustainability is not the goal, but the path," Cordech proclaimed.

Uniforms are not exempt from Udon's strategy, which now acquires them from a local company that manufactures them with recovered fibers. Now they are worn by the more than 1,000 employees who work in the company and its franchises. Taking into account both business models, Udon has opened six locations during 2023, which include international locations such as Miami, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic.

In these last two cases, it has done so in airports, where Udon has tested a new formula: ordering via tablets, similar to some fast food chains. After the success of these locations, Udon will replicate this model in three establishments at Madrid-Barajas Airport next year, Pascual announced.

However, demonstrating that Udon is not a fast food chain is one of the company's objectives, the co-founder emphasized. The company aims to do so with a differentiated and quality offering of Asian food conceived with international ambition and from a Barcelona perspective.