Fuddruckers

Luby’s Fuddruckers Restaurants, LLC

Type	Subsidiary
Industry	Restaurants
Genre	Fast casual
Founded	1979; 38 years ago (1979) (as Freddie Fuddruckers)
Founder	Philip J. Romano
Headquarters	Houston, Texas, U.S.
Number of locations	223 (2015)
Area served	Americas Europe Middle East
Key people	Peter Large (CEO)
Products	Grilled hamburgers
Revenue	$148.8 million
Parent	Luby's
Website	www.fuddruckers.com

Fuddruckers is an American fast casual, franchised restaurant chain that specializes in hamburgers. The Fuddruckers concept is to offer large hamburgers in which the meat is ground on-site and buns are baked on the premises. As of 2015, Fuddruckers had 77 company-operated restaurants and 111 franchises across the United States with one in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada, four in Bahrain, one in Chile, two in Italy, two in Mexico, one in Panama, one in Dominican Republic, one in Poland, one in Puerto Rico, two in Beirut, Lebanon, one in Morocco, five in United Arab Emirates and twelve in Saudi Arabia and recently in Colombia. The company headquarters is in Houston, Texas.

Fuddruckers was founded as Freddie Fuddruckers in 1979 by Philip J. Romano in San Antonio, Texas, in a location converted to a restaurant from an old bank. He started the chain because he thought that "the world needed a better hamburger." The Fuddruckers concept was to offer large hamburgers in which the meat was ground on-site and buns were baked on the premises and hamburgers and other dishes were offered with "lots of fresh sliced tomatoes, onions, lettuce and vats of cheese sauce." In California, Fuddruckers competed at the high end of the fast food market against chains such as Flakey Jake's, sometimes with head-to-head competitions in places such as Northridge, California. By 1988, there were 150 restaurants in the chain, according to a report in The New York Times. Romano left the chain in 1988 to found Romano's Macaroni Grill. In an interview, Romano stated that "I just felt I had done all I could for the concept."