Establishing a major fast-food brand into a new market involves far more than real estate and marketing budgets. It demands brands to walk a fine line between the consistency of their global name and the intricacies of the local cultures in which they seek to establish themselves.
Lorenzo Duque, development manager for one of the world’s largest quick-service brands in Latin American countries, has built his career on how to properly handle these strategies. Getting his start in aviation and then building a name in the restaurant business, he understands the balance when it comes to establishing international brands in local markets.
Getting His Start In The Aviation Industry
Lorenzo’s career began at Avianca Airlines, one of the oldest carriers in the world, where he helped guide the company through Chapter 11 restructuring during the pandemic. His work focused on rethinking operations, redesigning routes, and supporting the leadership team as they transitioned the century-old airline into a leaner, more efficient organization. The crisis demanded quick decision-making and deep analysis, giving him his first exposure to the mechanics of handling large businesses during turbulent times.
What stayed with Lorenzo from the experience was less the specific difficulties of the aviation industry and more the intellectual challenge behind reimagining a company’s future. “That was the first time I was exposed to what a business revamp or transformation is,” he later reflected, noting that witnessing how Avianca rebuilt itself sparked an interest in how struggling organizations could come out of difficult times stronger and with a new perspective on their own business.
Motivated by that experience, Lorenzo enrolled at Columbia Business School, looking to learn more about how businesses could grow under changing conditions. After completing his MBA, Duque returned briefly to aviation, first at American Airlines, where he worked on loyalty strategy, shaping programs designed to deepen customer engagement. Later, at Regent, an electric aircraft startup, he joined a team building a new form of travel altogether.
While Lorenzo was satisfied with his work throughout these roles, the specifics of the airline industry, whether it was on the tech side or the customer side, mattered less to him than exploring the notion of how to build or transform a business model so it could scale sustainably.
Getting Started In The Restaurant World
That perspective carried him into the food and beverage sector. He started working at Restaurant Brands International, the parent company of Burger King, Popeyes, and Firehouse Subs.
His role focused on “non-traditional” development, introducing these brands into venues like universities, airports, and stadiums where fast food traditionally lacked presence. At Burger King, he helped design expansion plans for high-traffic locations with unique logistical demands, while at Firehouse Subs, he guided the brand’s early push into new formats, mapping out where new units could thrive and how franchisees could adapt to unconventional settings.
What he discovered were the challenges that came with establishing well-known brands in places that required different operational models. Supply chains needed to deal with locations with limited storage, marketing strategies had to account for transient customer bases, and franchise partners needed clear roadmaps for running profitable stores in environments that didn’t have the predictability of a standard street-corner or shopping-center model.
“I realized quickly that growth isn’t just planting flags on a map,” he says. “It’s about making sure each location actually works — for the operators, for the customers, and for the brand over the long term.”
How Lorenzo Leads Latin American Transformations For Fast Food Giants
Today, Lorenzo oversees business transformation strategies for one of the world’s largest fast-food brands across Spanish-speaking Latin America. The work ranges from opening restaurants in entirely new countries to transforming their operations in existing markets.
One recent example was spearheading the entry of Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC), one of the company’s largest international brands, into Uruguay, a process that involved feasibility studies, supply chain sourcing, and making sure their marketing campaigns appealed properly to local consumers.
Opening a single restaurant, Lorenzo points out, requires layers of coordination across marketing, operations, real estate, and local partnerships. The Uruguay launch, to name one example, involved about 70 local team members and another 60 from the broader company, all working to ensure the flagship store would signal both the brand’s arrival and its commitment to the country. Market entry, he notes, often takes nearly a year of planning before the first meal is served.
Across all these efforts, Lorenzo emphasizes one principle: global brands succeed in Latin America when they feel genuinely local. That begins with franchise partnerships, where long-term viability depends on franchisees thriving alongside the brand itself.
Localization also shows up on menus and in marketing campaigns. Colombian locations serve arepas; Argentinian stores offer medialunas. These adaptations help overcome the perception of a brand like KFC, typically associated with the United States, as an import, especially when local cultural conceptions can sometimes complicate how American companies are viewed abroad.
Yet the balance remains delicate. Too much localization can dilute brand identity, whereas too little can alienate consumers. Lorenzo’s approach aims to maintain the reliability that comes with a global name while making each location feel like part of the local fabric. That strategy has fueled many brands’ momentum across Latin America, with some of them even outperforming their U.S. counterparts in consumer perception.
A Blueprint For Launching Brands Across Borders
For Lorenzo Duque, establishing a global brand across Latin America means blending consistency with cultural fluency. His work with brands like KFC shows that success abroad relies on local partnerships, thoughtful adaptations, and strategies that make international businesses feel truly rooted in each community they enter, helping them grow and establish themselves in new markets.