Pizza Hut Opens Its First Location in Iraq With Plans to Expand in Developing Countries : Safety : Food World News

Apr 10, 2014 03:54 PM EDT

Pizza Hut Opens Its First Location in Iraq With Plans to Expand in Developing Countries

As an effort to expand its brand, Pizza Hut has opened its first location in Iraq.

According to the Business Wire, a Pizza Hut has opened in the Majidi Mall in Erbil, the capital of the Kurdistan region and the country's third-largest city.The 120-seat dine-in restaurant opened its doors on Wednesday.

Pizza Hut's parent company, Yum! Brands, partnered with the Al Kout Food Company to open the restaurant. The restaurant features a menu in Kurdish and offers pizzas, flatbreads, pasta, desserts and more.

"We're pleased to be able to bring Pizza Hut to Iraq as part of the explosive growth for our brand around the world," Scott Bergren, CEO of Pizza Hut and Chief Innovation Officer of Yum! Brands, said in a statement. "While Pizza Hut's footprint is already significantly larger than our nearest competitor, we've still just scratched the surface of global growth. We are taking the powerful Pizza Hut Red Roof icon and accelerating the development of our brand across the Delivery, Express, and Dine-In channels around the world as only we can."

Yum! Brands and Al Kout Food Company will continue to work together to open four more locations in Eribl, including one in Sulaymaniyah, Iraq, the second-largest city in Kurdistan. The new location is an effort for companies to access the prospective of Iraq's growing market.

Yum! Brands Inc., and its franchisee partners plan to invest $10 Billion and have more than 20,000 restaurants in developing markets like Iraq, Russia or Africa by 2020.

"Kout Food Group is proud of its partnership with Yum! and the success of launching the first Pizza Hut Dine-In store in Iraq," said Fadwa Al-Homaizi, Managing Director of Al Kout Food Company and Co-founder and Chairwoman of Kout Food Group, in a news release. "Our utmost priority is to serve our customers with excellent products and services. This is in line with our strategy of expansion in Iraq. More and more customers are visiting the restaurant to test the high-quality Pizza Hut products and to enjoy the dine-in experience."

Pizza Hut has more than 13,000 restaurants in 85 countries and nearly 15,000 locations across the globe; China alone has more than 1,000 locations.