Kiwi burger joint keeps it in the family
A Kiwi family-owned burger franchise is expanding with a new location on the grill in Palmerston North.
Reburger founder Boris Reiber started the business as a food truck in Dunedin in late 2016. As its popularity grew in 2017 it moved into a restaurant and continued to grow rapidly.
The franchise is advertising for 10 Palmerston North positions to staff a new Reburger on the corner of Princess St and Broadway Ave – which will be the franchise’s sixth location to open.
It’ll be a family affair with Reiber’s sister, Josy Goggin, running the new store and their brother Timreiber, who owns and operates the Tauranga Reburger, helping with the set-up and fit-out for the opening on May 31.
Goggin said she was proud of her brother’s accomplishments over the past four years.
The siblings had always been close, but now they were spread out across New Zealand. Her brothers had young children, so they didn’t get to see each other as much as they’d like.
‘‘We’ve always made it work ... but it’s nice to be doing this with both my brothers ... we’re in almost constant contact right now.’’
Goggin said the first couple of weeks of a new Reburger can get ‘‘a bit nuts,’’ so the siblings would work alongside staff during that period to help lighten the load.
It was one of the lessons learned from the downside of the franchise’s rapid growth.
A painful reminder of that sits high up in the Google search results for the business.
Last year, student magazine Critic published a scathing article on working conditions over the original restaurant’s first two years.
Reiber said setting up the Reburger franchise was a steep learning curve. It got popular and grew overwhelmingly fast, and some management basics fell by the wayside in the early days. ‘‘We tried to run before we’d really learnt to walk ... and we definitely learnt some hard lessons.’’
Reiber said the franchise had since resolved the issues, and developed tested and streamlined procedures to ensure they weren’t repeated.
He took the wellbeing of his staff seriously, because Reburger was a family business and he wanted staff to feel like kin and enjoy coming to work.