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ArmyNavy Burger + Burrito
In 2009, with his first chain still unsold, Eric Puno opened a Tagaytay counter pairing In-N-Out-style burgers with Chipotle-style burritos β a combination no one in the Philippines had tried. Two years later he sold Yellow Cab Pizza for β±800M cash and deliberately excluded ArmyNavy, keeping it independent and growing to nearly 100 stores by 2024.
From a Tagaytay Counter to the Visayas and the Baguio Highlands
An independent chain that outlived the venture that funded its start
Eric Puno opened his second restaurant chain two years before he sold his first. In 2009, with Yellow Cab Pizza still unsold, he built a small Tagaytay counter pairing In-N-Out-style burgers with Chipotle-style burritos β a combination nobody in the Philippines had tried. When Pancake House Inc. bought Yellow Cab for β±800M in 2011, ArmyNavy was deliberately excluded.
Two chains, one sequencing decision
Puno’s route to ArmyNavy ran through franchising, not around it. He had been a Chowking franchisee since 1989, expanded to five stores by 2001, then co-founded Yellow Cab Pizza with fellow Chowking franchisees Henry Lee and Albert Tan β his first venture as a principal rather than a licensee. By 2009 Yellow Cab was an established Philippine pizza chain, but it wasn’t sold yet, and there was no guarantee it would sell on Puno’s terms or timeline. “Instead of creating two brands, I thought, why not put them together? Nobody had done that here,” Puno told FinancialAdviser.ph, describing the burger-burrito concept that became ArmyNavy. The idea mattered less than the timing: launching a second, unproven format while the first venture was still generating income meant the new bet didn’t have to work immediately β it had two years to find its feet before anyone was counting on it to replace anything.
A small counter’s growing pains
The first ArmyNavy store had no dine-in area and a limited menu, developed at home by Puno’s wife Bernadette, a former Chipotle cashier and kitchen worker. Scaling it exposed problems a single test kitchen hadn’t. The home-style egg-and-breadcrumb patty binders that worked for family cooking failed under restaurant volume, until an Australian food technologist recommended restaurant-grade alternatives. Early Tagaytay customers, unfamiliar with the burrito format, sliced them open with a fork rather than eating them by hand β the store added how-to-eat signage to fix it. And with Yellow Cab’s sale still pending, ArmyNavy leaned on early franchising to fund its own growth, a decision Puno would later come to regret. None of this was existential β no single event threatened to close the business β but January and February 2010 sales beating December’s, a reversal of the post-holiday slump that hits most Philippine quick-service chains, was the first real signal that the format could scale past one counter.
The exit that wasn’t ArmyNavy’s
In August 2011, Pancake House Inc. β not Max’s Group, which would only acquire Pancake House itself more than two years later β signed to buy 100% of Yellow Cab Foods Corp. for β±800M cash, taking over 82 stores, 69 of them company-owned. It was Puno’s first exit as a principal, cashing out the venture he’d built since 2001. ArmyNavy, the sister concept launched two years earlier specifically while Yellow Cab was still his, was excluded from the transaction and continued as an independent company. The sequencing paid off structurally: had Puno waited to start ArmyNavy until after the Yellow Cab sale closed, there would have been no vehicle left outside the deal to build into.
From franchisee to anti-franchisor
Once ArmyNavy had outgrown its cash-strapped early years, Puno reversed the franchising strategy that had funded its start. “Company-owned is better because you’re in better control,” he told Esquire Philippines in 2024. “I was a Chowking franchisee myself. You always try to scrimp on things, right? So you’re not 100% compliant. And that’s how it ruins the brand.” The chain expanded from 64 stores at a 2014 international-expansion announcement β which engaged World Franchise Associates and reached trade expos in Singapore and Dubai, though no confirmed overseas store ever resulted.
Domestically, that expansion reached a nationwide footprint spanning Luzon, the Visayas, and highland Baguio, extending beyond city malls into resort, transit, and provincial markets β a store at Subic Harbor Point by 2013, another inside NAIA Terminal 3, and outlets in Boracay, Camp John Hay in Baguio, and Ayala Center Cebu β into leisure and travel destinations a strict city-mall chain would have skipped, run out of a corporate headquarters on Jupiter Street in Makati’s Bel-Air district. Current store counts vary by source: Esquire reported “nearly 100” in June 2024, ArmyNavy’s own website currently states “more than 80,” and FinancialAdviser.ph cited “over 100” including cloud kitchens as of May 2025 β the range, not a single figure, is the honest current picture.
A hedge that outlasted the business it hedged
ArmyNavy’s best sales year came in 2019, a year before the pandemic β and the delivery infrastructure built in anticipation of that record turned out to matter more than anyone could have known. When Covid-19 lockdowns hit in 2020, the chain beat its pre-pandemic highs despite running fewer open branches, riding the delivery pivot made a year earlier. Seventeen years after that first Tagaytay counter, ArmyNavy remains what it was built to be: the second act that didn’t need the first one’s buyer’s permission to keep going.