The lines for Cuban potato balls and chorizo meat pies at Porto’s Bakery are getting farther away. They’re just not likely to get any shorter.
The Glendale stalwart, known for its affordable food and lines stretching out the door, is in expansion mode.
But diners shouldn’t expect the new branches to offer relief from the lines at its Glendale, Burbank or Downey outposts – the family-owned business is moving even farther afield, planning bakeries in West Covina and Anaheim.
“The No. 1 reason we go out is to follow our clients,” said Betty Porto, the company’s vice president of community relations. In 2006, 30 years after opening in Glendale, the family opened its second location, in Burbank. But drawing a regional crowd proved not enough to satisfy demand from customers, who apparently traveled the 20 miles from Downey for a taste of its Cubanos, sandwiches of slow roasted pork, Swiss cheese, pickles, butter and a mustard-mayonnaise mix on Cuban bread, and other fare.
“We looked at the ZIP codes people put in a box we left out for two years and people were putting down Downey and the surrounding area,” Porto said.
After a successful expansion to Downey, Porto said the company is pursuing locations in West Covina and Anaheim. No locations have been identified, but the company hopes to finalize deals in the coming months. There was no definite time line for when doors would open.
Porto said each of the company’s bakeries – which do all their baking on site instead of having it shipped in from a central kitchen – processes about 5,000 transactions a day, averaging $25 to $35 each, which amounts to a conservative $375,000 in sales a day. (She declined to provide the company’s annual revenue.)
To support that volume, the chain employs 850 people across its three locations. Its bread makers and managers are full-time employees with benefits. The bulk of its employment base, however, is made up of part-time front-line workers, often students from nearby schools, who staff the counters and deal with the crush of customers.
She conceded that the emphasis on part-time workers was in part made to avoid paying overtime wages to keep costs lower. Yet that poses its own problems, since Porto said finding and keeping the right personnel is always a challenge.
When the doors open, she said, many workers can be overwhelmed, even with preparation.
“You open the store and day one you have lines going around the block,” she said. “It’s overwhelming when it’s your first job and you have 1,000 people waiting outside and you’re supposed to open up with no mistakes. The first year is tough because you have tons of people leaving.”
The growing pains will likely be felt not just in the turnover at the new locations, but in the existing bakeries as well, since they will be asked to give up their best managers and supervisors to support new outposts.
“You will usually overhire by 25 percent when opening a new location,” said Laura O’Hare, a restaurant consultant with West L.A.’s Hospitality Collective. “It’s stressful. Employees will come and not like it.”
Porto’s expansion effort comes as a second generation takes the helm of the business.
The first Porto’s was opened by Raul and Rosa Porto in Echo Park shortly after they came to the United States from Cuba in 1971. The bakery moved to Glendale in 1976, and for the next 30 years, its reputation – and lines – grew.
The Portos brought their three children – Betty, Vice President Margarita Navarro and Chief Executive Raul Jr. – into the business after they graduated from college in the 1980s. The new generation started planning the evolution and expansion of the Porto’s concept.
The first moves were “baby steps,” Betty Porto explained, starting with the menus.
As Glendale’s skyline grew taller, Porto’s started offering more sandwiches and coffee for workers in the area.
“The (expansion of the) city of Glendale forced us to grow and come up with more sandwiches and drinks,” she said.
The restaurant moved to a bigger location in Glendale in 1995 and then doubled its size in 2002 to 20,000 square feet before expanding to nearby Burbank before opening further south in Downey.
The move to Burbank, in 2006, came the same year the senior Portos retired and handed the business fully over to their children.
Though the company is currently set on five locations, Betty Porto said she cannot be certain it will always stay that way. The family might explore going into wholesale one day, but the future for the bakery mostly depends on what the co-founders’ grandchildren, now in college, want to do with the business.
“We have seven children we have to think about, and they don’t want us to sell the business,” said Porto, 56. “We only have so many years of life and we want to retire someday. What do they want to do? What is the next step for Porto’s?”
