Juici Patties in the Domes Plaza on Hagley Park Road has expanded into the retail market, eleven years after starting out as a strategic wholesale dealership for the Jukie Chin-led restaurant chain.

Juici Patties franchisee Glaister Prince last week moved the operation out of a 500 square-foot building in the Domes Plaza, which he had been leasing since 1999, into a 3,500 square-foot full dining facility within the same complex. According to Prince, the rationale behind the move is to meet demand for the burgeoning retail side of the business, a segment of the operations that was not a part of initial plans.

“The concept in the Domes was never to do retail,” he told the Business Observer, adding “It is really a wholesale expanding into retail by accident.”

The Juici Patties outlet in the Domes was set up by Prince in March 1999 to make wholesale deliveries of patties to schools within the corporate area. According to the franchisee, he had been contracted by Juici two years prior to distribute the company’s signature product to the schools, an underserviced market at the time. But demand for delivery of the patties “grew so much and so quickly,” Prince said, that the restaurant’s head office in May Pen decided that an outlet should open for wholesale deliveries to corporate area schools.

“In 1999, a 500 square-foot warehouse in the Domes at 85 Hagley Park Road was transformed into the first Juici Patties wholesale outlet outside of Clarendon,” noted Prince.

However, not long after, Prince said customers, having smelled the patties being baked at the location, started walking inside the facility demanding retail service.

“It was decided that we should satisfy the demand of these retail customers and after obtaining Juici head office approval, we started selling retail on a take out basis with a couple of seats for customers who squeezed into our 500 square-foot establishment. We were only able to sell patties and could not offer the cooked breakfast and lunch like other Juici outlets,” he said.

Subsequently over the years, the demand increased for retail — and wholesale — and customers started demanding full retail service, including Juici cooked food products, said Prince. The upshot is the new Juici Patties building in the Domes Plaza — owned by the company — that offers full scale retail and wholesale services.

“In addition to the wide range of Juici products, our location at the Domes also offers delivery service of tasty Juici lunches to customers within a certain radius of (the location) and we shall still continue to serve wholesale customers, delivering patties to our schools,” said the businessman.

Jukie Chin was nominated in 2000 for the Observer Business Leader Award for developing the Juici Patties brand from a crude, single man operation, into a major restaurant chain with branches in all parishes. The company has rapidly expanded over its 30 years of existence, from a single operation in May Pen to over 50 branches across the island