Richeese Factory Brand Guidelines: Nabati’s 2011 Bandung Cheese-Sauce Fried Chicken Chain

From a cheese wafer to a Bandung restaurant counter.

Richeese Factory opened its first restaurant on 8 February 2011 at the Paris Van Java shopping mall in Bandung, the capital of West Java, iNews reported in August 2022. English Wikipedia gives the same date and place. The chain is run by PT Richeese Kuliner Indonesia, a subsidiary of PT Kaldu Sari Nabati Indonesia, the Bandung snack maker better known by its Nabati brand. iNews dates Nabati to 1993 and says it traded as PT Nabati Jaya Indonesia until a change of name in 2007; its first product was a small cheese-flavoured wafer.

The restaurant name was borrowed from that wafer world. Richeese began as the name of a cheese-cream wafer that Nabati launched in 2006, and CNN Indonesia wrote in November 2023 that putting the word on the restaurant was meant to carry the wafer’s cheese flavour into the chain’s own cheese sauce. The same piece describes Richeese Factory as part of a Bandung-based group with several business units, from packaged snacks and drinks to distribution and e-commerce, so the chain sits beside sister companies rather than standing alone. Among the group’s snack names, the same article lists Nabati Wafer, Nextar, Siip, Ahh and Time Break, and it dates the group’s own sales and distribution company, PT Pinus Merah Abadi, to 2013. The group timeline it prints places the first Richeese Factory between the cheese wafer of 2006 and a Richeese instant noodle of 2022, so the restaurant is one stop in a longer run of products that share the name.

CNN Indonesia wrote in 2023 that the chain is often taken for a foreign brand, and stressed that it began in Bandung and that its owners are from the city; English Wikipedia gives Bandung as its headquarters. Indonesian Wikipedia adds that the same operator also runs a pizza offshoot under the name Richeese Pizza, and lists the fried chicken in three flavours: Richicken, Hot & Spicy Chicken and Fire Chicken.

Fried chicken, a cheese dip and a scale of heat.

The menu is built around one pairing: crisp fried chicken served with a cheese sauce. iNews described it in 2022 as fried chicken with cheese sauce alongside chicken pieces and wings coated in a spicy barbecue sauce at different levels of heat. The heat scale is part of the identity. Infobank, reporting from a press gathering in February 2024, described the signature Fire Chicken as crisp fried chicken in barbecue sauce offered at six levels, numbered 0 to 5, and served with the house cheese sauce.

Two other chicken lines sat next to it at that point, the same report said: Flying Chicken, dusted with what the chain calls Volcano powder, and Richicken, a savoury version without the barbecue coating. Both came with the cheese sauce. CNN Indonesia mentioned a drink called Pink Lava among the early menu items, and the Malaysian entertainment site Hype noted in September 2024 that Malaysian diners discussing the chain singled out the Fire Chicken and the mashed potato side.

The menu items carry their own small badges. In February 2024, Infobank said, the chain reintroduced its three main chicken menus, two of them with a newly designed emblem logo and a fresh tagline used as a hashtag. On its own website the chain addresses its customers as “Cheesemate”, promotes an ordering app, and offers bulk orders and birthday parties, a tone of voice that leans on the cheese theme at every turn.

The rooms are designed to match. Both CNN Indonesia in 2023 and Infobank in 2024 describe the outlets as modern and industrial in style, and present them as places where families with children sit down to eat rather than only collect a takeaway.

Design and documentation.

Indonesian restaurant, bakery, noodle, donut and café chains meet most of their customers in a small number of settings: the shopping mall, the airport, the railway station, the shophouse row and, increasingly, the rest areas along the toll roads. In each of these the shopfront has to work from a distance. A single dominant colour, a short name and a sign that can be read across a food court often do more of the identity work than any printed material.

Inside, the menu board is where a brand is defined. Chains in this category tend to name their dishes and drinks plainly, whether a fried rice, a noodle bowl, a bento set, a filled bun or an iced tea, and to group them into sets and children’s packages. Packaging follows the same logic: takeaway boxes, cups and bags carry the name and colours out of the room, and delivery-only kitchens and kiosk formats now let a brand trade with little more than a counter and its packaging.

The store network is itself part of the story the companies tell. Corporate pages often present history as a sequence of openings, a first outlet in a new city or on a new island, a numbered milestone store, and a running count of outlets and cities across the archipelago and, for some chains, abroad. Those counts change quickly, so each one needs its date attached.

Ownership is described in different ways. Some chains are run by a single private company that keeps every outlet in its own hands; others grow through franchise or partnership networks, and some sit inside larger food and drink groups. Founders’ stories, the operating company’s name and the halal certification a chain holds are commonly set out on the corporate pages, and the guides that follow give each of them only as the sources state them.

From one Bandung mall to Malaysia and Shenzhen.

The network grew quickly, and every count belongs to its date. CNN Indonesia reported 238 outlets by October 2023, across Indonesia and in the Kuala Lumpur area. Infobank put the Indonesian figure at 250 in February 2024, with the newest opening then in Palopo, South Sulawesi. The same report cited a 2023 study by the location-mapping firm GapMaps, which found that fast-food restaurants were hard to find in Indonesian towns of fewer than 200,000 people. IDN Times reported 300 outlets in Indonesia in December 2024.

Malaysia was the first country outside Indonesia. English Wikipedia says a Malaysian subsidiary was set up in 2019 and that the first outlet opened at the 1 Utama shopping centre in Bandar Utama on 4 February 2023. A company spokesperson told Infobank in February 2024 that there were 11 Malaysian outlets after less than a year, and Hype counted more than 30 in Malaysia as of September 2024.

China followed. English Wikipedia says the group set up a catering company in Nansha, Guangzhou, in July 2024 and opened its first Richeese Factory in Shenzhen on 28 August 2024; IDN Times also reported the Shenzhen opening that August, and the chain’s website carries a notice announcing its arrival in China.

For a design guide, Richeese Factory shows how a flavour name from a snack aisle can become a restaurant brand, with a numbered heat scale, a cheese-sauce dip and an industrial dining room doing the work that a mascot might do elsewhere. Compare HokBen, another Indonesian fast-food chain, and KFC, the American fried-chicken chain. For this guide we use fire red, cheese gold and charcoal with a heavy grotesque sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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