ROSEMEAD, Calif. — The California entrepreneurs who brought Panda Express Chinese food to malls and airports throughout the country are now betting that Americans will want the same standardization in something a little less tasty — dry cleaning.
Co-chief executives Andrew and Peggy Cherng, who built a fast-food empire of quick-serve Asian cooking, now want to bring the same chain-venue principle to clothes.
The Cherngs’ new company, Panda Dry Cleaning, plans to open as many as 200 standardized shops nationwide in the next five years in conjunction with consumer-goods giant Procter & Gamble.
The first of the franchised shops, under the name Tide Dry Cleaners, opened last week in the Las Vegas suburb of Henderson.
“There isn’t any consolidation in this particular industry,” Andrew Cherng said. “There is no McDonald’s of dry cleaners. We see this as an opportunity.”
The closest is probably Martinizing, a 62-year-old Ohio-based chain that claims to be the country’s largest dry-cleaning franchiser, with locations across the U.S. and in eight other countries and territories.
Panda is set to open at least five more Tide cleaners in 2012. Many of the future shops could be planned for California, where they have exclusive rights to develop the facilities.
As it did decades ago with Chinese food, the Panda team hopes to take a scattered market and create a dominant national brand. With the Panda fast-food restaurants starting to crowd one another in key markets, the Cherngs looked to dry cleaning as another way to stretch their entrepreneurship muscles.
“The restaurants are already pretty saturated,” Cherng said. “Doing another line of business presents us with more real estate opportunities.”
To learn the laundry business, they have to bring in experts. Panda is buying Summit Cleaners of Colorado Springs, for an undisclosed sum, to provide trainers for its new venture.
“We obviously don’t have operating experience in running dry-cleaning sites,” said Mark Tarzian, who is heading the Panda cleaners venture. “It was a tactical move to gain experience. We need to gain expertise rapidly.”
The $9.2 billion dry-cleaning industry is made up of nearly 39,000 establishments across the country, according to the research group IBISWorld. The market is highly fragmented, with the top four companies generating 2.5 percent of total revenue. More than 90 percent of dry cleaners have only one facility.
Analysts say dry cleaners are headed for a revival in the next few years amid heightened demand from hospitals, restaurants and hotels.
But the number of dry-cleaning companies has shrunk nearly 2 percent each year between 2006 and 2011 as consumers scaled back spending and operators struggled with rising utility costs, more stringent environmental regulations and concerns that too much dry cleaning wears out clothing.
Andrew Cherng, who was born in China, opened the first Panda Inn restaurant in 1973 in Pasadena before being invited a decade later to open a food-court version in the Glendale Galleria. Cherng and his wife eventually grew that operation into a fast-food empire that had sales of $1.4 billion last year, according to the Technomic research company.
