'Ethical' chicken restaurant Hen crowdfunds £150k for London expansion

Hen aims to challenge ‘unethical and unhealthy’ high street restaurants by serving high welfare, locally sourced chicken.

The ‘honest’ chicken shop has raised £150,000 and is aiming to open six sites in the capital and 15 under franchise by 2020.

Hen founder Philip Ilic told BigHospitality that he was ‘hugely grateful’ to all the investors and that the Crowdcube campaign had sparked a surge of interest from potential franchisees.

“We have so much demand, we won't be able to meet it and will most likely have a waiting list,” said Ilic.

“So our problem is not how many franchise partners we can find, but how many [sites] we can do in one year.”

Ilic said he was planning open the first London Hen in the 'near future' and was looking at ‘numerous locations from Fitzrovia to Brixton’.

“The most important decision I will be making over the next year is the location of the next site, so we are taking this very seriously,” he said.

“I think the maximum [number of restaurants] we can cope with in one year is two fully managed franchisees, or one company owned store and one fully franchised store.

“We also are talking to numerous people who would like to open non managed franchisees - a normal Hen franchise which they would personally run - so we shall see how this develops over the next year.”