In their 2026 half-year letter to shareholders, Guzman y Gomez (GYG) Co-CEOs Steven Marks and Hilton Brett pulled back the curtain on what’s really driving one of Australia’s most ambitious restaurant stories — from 18 recipe iterations to a strict cap on US expansion.
1. They iterated on a salad dressing 18 times.
The Caesar campaign — GYG’s flagship menu push for the half — wasn’t just a marketing play. It took 18 development iterations to land on the gourmet Caesar salad dressing that anchored three new menu items. The result? Record guest counts and record transactions.
This kind of detail signals something important about how GYG operates: food quality is a non-negotiable constraint, not a variable. In a fast-food industry where speed-to-market is often the priority, GYG’s patience is a genuine point of difference — and the co-CEOs were clear they “will never compromise on the quality of our food by releasing a menu item that we are not proud of.”
2. AI is coming to the kitchen — and it’s already here in the back office.
GYG’s tech ambitions go well beyond a shiny new app. The company upgraded its point-of-sale platform, built a proprietary in-house order management system, and is now piloting vision AI and robotic weighing technologies in restaurants to improve order accuracy in real time. A successful trial at their Crows Nest location means a full network rollout is planned for this year.
The co-CEOs also flagged “significant opportunity to use AI to drive further efficiencies in our above-restaurant infrastructure” — a deliberately vague teaser that suggests the technology investment runs deeper than what’s been disclosed. Digitised chicken temperature monitoring has already been rolled out nationally, reducing what the team described as their largest food safety risk.
3. The FY26 Australian real estate pipeline is the strongest it’s ever been.
With 237 Australian restaurants and a long-term target of 1,000, GYG isn’t slowing down. The company opened 15 new restaurants in the first half, with 18 more planned for H2 — bringing the full-year total to 32. More tellingly, they have 108 sites with commercial terms already agreed, of which more than 85% are drive-thru formats.
The economics justify the confidence. Drive-thru restaurants opened between FY23–FY25 delivered an average ROI of 55% for franchisees and 82% for corporate-owned restaurants over the past 12 months. The median franchise restaurant margin now sits around 22%. These are numbers that make it considerably easier to sign the next lease.
4. The US is a controlled experiment — and they’re honest about it.
The co-CEOs devoted considerable space in their letter to calibrating expectations around the United States. With eight restaurants today — including two new openings in Des Plaines and Bucktown — US network sales grew 67% year over year. But they’re careful not to oversell it.
“We want to stress that this is a start-up business,” they wrote plainly. Their cap is explicit: GYG will not expand beyond 15 US restaurants until the model is proven. The US$7 Cali Burrito campaign showed early brand resonance, and new hires in marketing and catering are being made to build momentum — but leadership is clearly playing a long game.
As a reminder of just how patient they’re willing to be, the letter notes it took from 2006 to 2018 for Australian restaurants to average $40k per week in sales, and another seven years to reach $100k.
5. Community isn’t a PR strategy — it’s embedded in how they operate.
The final section of the letter is easy to skim past, but it reveals something genuine about the GYG culture. The company’s annual Misión Posible fundraiser raised over $1.6 million for the Misión México Foundation and The Hunger Project. GYG and its franchise partners now support more than 80 local sports clubs across Australia.
On the environmental side, an organic waste program has launched across New South Wales, diverting up to 17% of restaurant waste from landfill into compost or energy generation, with a national rollout planned for H2. These commitments aren’t buried in an ESG appendix — they’re written into the same letter as the financial results, by the co-CEOs themselves.
