Eric Puno

I didn't have enough cash to expand. In 2009 we hadn't sold Yellow Cab yet, so I asked, how do we grow? We franchised first to get growth and brand recognition.

A reset with no safety net #

The furniture business is documented only in outline: five stores, run with his brothers, undone by the 1987 crash and the real-estate slump it triggered. No city, no closing date, no dollar figure survives in the record — the kind of loss that gets mentioned once, briefly, years later, by someone who has moved past dwelling on it. What is clear is the shape of the decision that followed: Puno did not stay in the US to rebuild. He came back to the Philippines, to a market he understood, with no professional footing in the industry that would eventually define his career. It would take him twelve years, a franchise he didn’t design, and a second business he built from scratch before he owned anything entirely his own.

Robert Kuan granted him a Chowking franchise in 1989 — Baclaran, store #19, one of the chain’s earliest locations. It was not the outcome Puno had planned. He had gone to Jollibee first, the market leader, the obvious first call for anyone entering Philippine quick-service food. Being redirected to its smaller, newer rival meant starting again from a position with no leverage: a franchisee, following someone else’s playbook, in a business he’d never run before. He grew that single store to five over the following decade, learning the mechanics of quick-service food — supply chains, staffing, margins on volume — from inside a system he didn’t control. The identity behind the name attached to some of this history is not fully settled: press coverage of his later ventures consistently uses “Eric Puno,” while at least one contemporaneous filing lists a company principal as “Edgardo M. Puno” in the same role at the same company — a strong but unconfirmed inference, not a documented fact.

Franchisee to founder #

The constraints of franchise ownership are what pushed him toward building something of his own. A franchisee scrimps where the system lets him; a franchisee complies only as much as the economics allow. Puno would later describe the tension plainly: half-compliance is how a brand gets ruined, and half-compliance is what a stretched franchisee is structurally pushed toward. He wanted a business where that trade-off wasn’t built into the ownership structure.

In 2001 he co-founded Yellow Cab Pizza with two fellow Chowking franchisees, Henry Lee and Albert Tan. The three had spent years operating inside the same franchise structure, watching the same margins get squeezed by the same rules none of them had written. The idea had a domestic origin: his wife’s homemade pizza, good enough that turning it into a menu felt less like invention than translation. Yellow Cab opened its first branch on Makati Avenue and grew from there — the first venture where Puno was a principal rather than a licensee, building a brand instead of running someone else’s.

A second bet before the first one paid off #

By 2009, Yellow Cab still hadn’t sold. Puno opened a second, unrelated concept anyway — a small counter beside an existing Yellow Cab outlet in Tagaytay, serving burgers and burritos, two American comfort foods that hadn’t previously shared a menu in the Philippines. It was a hedge with no guarantee behind it: cash was tight, the format was untested, and the business he actually needed to sell hadn’t moved. He franchised the new concept early, before it had proven itself, specifically to generate the growth and brand recognition he couldn’t otherwise afford. “I didn’t have enough cash to expand,” he said of the decision years later. “In 2009 we hadn’t sold Yellow Cab yet, so I asked, how do we grow? We franchised first to get growth and brand recognition.”

The bet paid off structurally two years later. In August 2011, Pancake House Inc. disclosed to the Philippine Stock Exchange that it was in talks to acquire Yellow Cab, then held by Entaben Holdings, Little Company of Mary, and Avianti Capital. The deal closed at the end of the month: ₱800 million cash for 100% of Yellow Cab Foods Corp. — Puno’s first venture as an owner rather than a franchisee, cashed out at a nine-figure valuation. ArmyNavy, the sister concept he’d opened two years earlier while Yellow Cab was still unsold, was deliberately left out of the sale. The hedge he’d taken out of necessity became the business he kept.

What the franchise years taught him #

What Puno carried forward from Chowking and Yellow Cab wasn’t a recipe or a real-estate strategy — it was a view of ownership. He had seen, from inside a franchise system, how little room a licensee has to protect a brand once volume forces compromise. Having sold his first company as an asset with equity spread across institutional holders, he ran his second on a different premise: control that didn’t depend on someone else’s tolerance for how tightly the rules were followed. That didn’t mean ArmyNavy avoided the same pressures Puno had learned to navigate as a franchisee — the company franchised early in its own history, for the same reason he once had: not enough cash to grow any other way. The difference was that this time the decision was his to make and his to reverse.

The pandemic tested his premise without warning. A delivery investment made a year before anyone knew a lockdown was coming let ArmyNavy post its best sales on record in 2020 — evidence that the discipline he’d built into the business held under pressure he hadn’t planned for. By his own account, the timing was foresight rather than luck, though the claim rests on his own telling rather than independent confirmation.

The line from a five-store collapse in 1987 to a nine-figure exit in 2011 is not a straight one. It runs through a franchise he didn’t choose, a decade spent learning someone else’s system, and a second bet made before the first had proven itself. Each stage taught him something the last one hadn’t: how to operate inside constraints, and eventually, how to build a business without them.

Last updated: October 10, 2026