Frisby Brand Guidelines: The Pereira Pizzeria That Became a Fried Chicken Chain

A pizzeria in Pereira, and a name taken from a toy.

Frisby began in Pereira, the capital of Risaralda in Colombia’s coffee region, in 1977. It was the idea of a married couple, Alfredo Hoyos Mazuera and Liliana Restrepo Arenas, El Tiempo reported in May 2025. Hoyos already knew the poultry trade: he had worked on a chicken farm in Indiana in the United States and, back in Colombia, had opened a chicken roastery in Pereira called Pollo Loco before stepping away from the poultry business around 1976. English Wikipedia gives the opening date as 12 June 1977.

The first business was not a chicken shop at all. In 1977 the couple opened a pizzeria near Parque El Lago in central Pereira, which El Tiempo describes as the city’s first. Hoyos ran the restaurant and Restrepo looked after the customers, the couple’s son Álvaro has recalled. Xataka Colombia, writing in May 2025, describes the opening menu as pizza and ice cream.

The name came from the pizza. The couple had brought an Italian pizza maker to Pereira, and he spun the dough in the air in front of curious crowds. According to an interview Hoyos gave to Noticias Caracol, quoted by El Tiempo, passers-by called the tossed bases “arepas voladoras”, flying arepas, and asked for them by that name. Hoyos saw that the movement looked like the game of throwing a frisbee, and changed the ending of the word, swapping the double “e” for a “y” to make it a brand name of his own.

Hoyos called the result a “marca de fantasía”, an invented brand name: Frisby comes from that image of a spinning pizza base, not from the founders’ names or from the fried chicken the chain later became known for.

From pizza to pressure-fried chicken.

The turn to chicken came soon after. Looking for more products to sell, the couple went back to what Hoyos knew, but chose to offer breaded fried chicken rather than the roast chicken more common in Colombia at the time, El Tiempo reported. Their son has said that Hoyos visited a restaurant trade fair in Chicago, saw a pressure fryer of a kind not then available in Colombia, bought one, and brought to Pereira for six months a man who had worked with Harland Sanders, the founder of KFC. Together they worked out the recipe; within a month, the son recalled, the chicken was outselling the pizza.

English Wikipedia says the company began expanding across the Coffee Axis in 1978; Spanish Wikipedia names Armenia, Cartago and Manizales among the early cities. Both encyclopaedias date its arrival in Bogotá to 1987 and in Medellín to 1990, and Spanish Wikipedia adds that restaurants were opened in the United States and Venezuela. English Wikipedia describes the chain today as known for fried chicken served with honey.

Spanish Wikipedia also records a wider group. It says Frisby opened a restaurant under a second brand, Wingz, in Pereira in 2007, later adding branches in Manizales, Bogotá and Medellín, and that the company, organised as a holding, runs the Colombian franchises of Sarku Japan and Cinnabon.

The chain’s size is given in company figures reported by the press. In May 2025 El Tiempo, citing the company, put it at about 265 restaurants in 57 municipalities with some 4,500 workers. In March 2026 Forbes Colombia described Frisby S.A. BIC as operating more than 270 restaurants in Colombia with about 5,500 employees.

Restaurant and café chains.

Latin American restaurant, burger, chicken and café chains tend to present themselves first through the street. A shop front carries the name, a short line of colour and often a counter or an ice-cream window that can be read from the pavement, and many chains run more than one format under the same name: a quick-service counter, a table-service restaurant, a kiosk in a shopping centre or a separate ice-cream shop. Drive-through lanes, delivery apps and self-service ordering screens have since joined the shop front as places where the name has to work.

Menus do much of the brand work. Chains in the region usually give their signature dishes their own names, from a house burger to a named roast chicken or a crêpe, and repeat those names across menu boards, packaging and campaigns. Mascots and characters appear in some of these identities, and seasonal campaigns are often built around a new named dish or a limited line rather than around the company itself.

Ownership is often a group matter. Several of the larger chains belong to food or restaurant groups that run a number of brands side by side, sometimes including franchises of international names, and the parent usually describes each brand as a separate business with its own identity. Others have stayed in the hands of their founding families for decades and present that continuity as part of the story.

Corporate pages and the business press fill in the rest: who founded the chain, in which city and year, who owns it now, and where it has opened abroad, usually through franchising in neighbouring countries, Spain or the United States. For a design reader, the useful evidence is what each company itself publishes, and how consistently its name, colours and dishes carry from one format to the next.

A family firm from the coffee region.

Frisby grew out of a family already in the poultry trade. Writing in El Tiempo in December 2020, the author Jorge Emilio Sierra Montoya traced it to Alfredo Hoyos Mejía, Hoyos Mazuera’s father, a Pereira merchant who turned his farm, Sierra Morena, into a poultry farm and moved into hatching, animal feed and egg sales. His son set up on his own. In 1965 he founded the Granja Santa Inés, a broiler farm financed with a loan from the Caja Agraria, and soon added a slaughterhouse selling frozen chicken in plastic bags, the business that from 1968 traded as Pimpollo.

That history links Frisby to the other chicken chain in this guide. According to the same article, Pimpollo later passed to Kokoriko, a group in which Hoyos Mazuera was a partner in its early years, around 1972, when he exchanged shares and created a new company, Avinco, which he managed. He later sold his share of Kokoriko to the Robayo family and set out to sell fried rather than roast chicken. With partners, he tested recipes at home among family and friends before Frisby began selling at the Parque El Lago premises in 1977; in this account, the pizzeria there was closed to make room for the fried chicken business.

The company is still run by its co-founder from the coffee region. In June 2023 El Tiempo described Liliana Restrepo Arenas as president of the chain and reported that its plant and administrative headquarters are in Dosquebradas, the industrial municipality next to Pereira. The paper put the chain at that point at 270 restaurants, 200 of them company-owned, in 58 municipalities, with about 5,000 employees. It also said Frisby had at one time had outlets in New York and Venezuela but had decided to concentrate on the Colombian market, and that the restaurant where it all began, Frisby El Lago, was still open.

The sister brand has a look of its own. In September 2022 the trade publication Mall & Retail reported that Wingz, part of Grupo Frisby, was opening in Medellín, bringing it to seven restaurants serving wings, burgers, chicken tenders, ribs and beer. It described the concept as following the retro line the brand had used from the start, with architecture, images, icons, colours and music recalling the decades from the 1980s to 2000. In June 2023 El Tiempo counted six Wingz restaurants, alongside the Sarku Japan franchise.

For a design guide, Frisby shows how much of a restaurant brand can rest on an invented name and one signature product, carried from a single Pereira shop to a national chain, with a sister brand given a distinct retro look. Compare Kokoriko, the Bogotá roast chicken chain, and KFC. For this guide we use a fryer red, honey gold and crust cream with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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