There are businesses that grow by multiplying points of sale. Others grow by multiplying a specific way of treating people, and it’s that multiplication that sustains everything else. Bold Hospitality Company, the holding company behind Outback Steakhouse, Abbraccio and Aussie Chicken and More in Brazil, belongs to that second group. Before being a chain of more than 200 restaurants, it’s a form of hospitality that repeats itself, with conviction, at every table served.
The story began in 1997, when the first Outback Steakhouse unit opened its doors in Barra da Tijuca, Rio de Janeiro. Almost three decades later, the brand remains the group’s flagship, alongside Abbraccio, which arrived in 2015 bringing an Italian reinterpretation of fresh ingredients, and Aussie Chicken and More, created in 2020 and now also present in delivery with the spin-off brand Aussie Salad. Together, the three operations bring together more than 15,000 employees and more than 200 restaurants distributed across 22 states and the Federal District.
The pace of expansion isn’t modest. In 2025 alone, there were at least eleven new openings, and the company’s stated goal is to reach 400 restaurants by 2030, with new markets and acquisitions also in Latin America. This kind of growth makes headlines and quarterly reports, but it tests something no headline captures: what happens, in practice, inside each new restaurant, in the first weeks of operation.
That’s where the real complexity of growth lives. Opening a unit is relatively fast: hiring, training and integrating an entire team to sustain, from day one, the same standard of hospitality that took almost three decades to build is another story. And that’s exactly where the challenge lies: reproducing, in every new location and with every newly hired person, the same culture that made the brand one of the most beloved in the country.
Bold Hospitality Company’s challenge doesn’t stem from a one-off problem — it stems from the very nature of the business. A restaurant depends on dozens of small decisions made, at the same time, by many different people: how to greet a guest, how to recommend a dish, how to act when an order is delayed, how to maintain food safety standards at every stage in the kitchen. Multiplied across more than 200 units and a team of more than 15,000 people, this set of decisions stops being an operational detail and becomes the very product the brand sells.
The company’s culture has always been built around well-defined Principles and Beliefs, spread through rituals such as All Hands and processes such as On Job Experience, where new employees experience the operation firsthand before taking on their roles. These rituals work very well when the team is small and proximity between leadership and operations is natural. The problem appears when the chain expands at the pace Bold has been sustaining: the culture still needs to reach, in the same way, whoever joins the team at a newly opened unit, months after the restaurant was celebrated on the company’s internal channels.
No one lacks commitment in this process. What can be missing is a structure that sustains that commitment when the operation grows faster than proximity between people can keep up with. That’s the point where training stops being just an HR process and becomes a condition for the brand to keep being recognized for what it has always been: genuine hospitality, delivered by people who deeply understand what it represents.
Without a common structure across the three brands and hundreds of units, the most obvious risk is inconsistency: two restaurants of the same brand, just a few miles apart, can offer noticeably different service experiences, simply because each team’s training followed different scripts, applied by different leaders, at different times. This kind of variation is especially delicate in a sector where food safety, product handling and kitchen processes aren’t just good practices, but requirements that need to be met and proven at any inspection, internal audit or compliance visit.
There’s also a less visible, but equally relevant, cost: time. Each new unit depends on an entirely new team, which needs to quickly learn the menu, service processes and brand culture before opening its doors to the public, and any delay in this process translates directly into customer experience and financial results. Add to that the naturally high turnover of the food service sector, and the challenge of repeating training consistently becomes even greater.
Main challenges identified:
These four points don’t compete with each other, they add up. Each one, on its own, would already be cause for attention; together, they form the kind of bottleneck that can only be solved with a structure designed for scale, not with more individual effort from people who are already overloaded in day-to-day operations.
The question guiding the journey is: how do you sustain the same standard of hospitality and safety across more than 200 restaurants, with a team that never stops growing?
The answer to this kind of challenge rarely lies in training more, but rather in training differently. Instead of pulling the employee out of the operation to train them at an isolated moment, the logic becomes something else: bringing training into the actual flow of work, available exactly when it’s needed, on the device the person already uses day to day.
For Bold Hospitality Company and Happmobi, this logic translates into a single learning platform, capable of serving, at the same time, the particularities of three different brands and the reality of a team made up mostly of frontline employees. A server who needs a quick refresher on a food safety process, a manager taking over a newly opened unit, an operating partner who needs to track their team’s performance: each one finds, on the same platform, the right content for their moment, without depending on someone physically nearby to teach it.
At the same time, for the most sensitive content, such as iconic recipes and exclusive preparation processes, the same platform allows restricting access to secure, approved environments, without sacrificing the agility of those learning other topics freely.
This change doesn’t replace the value of the hands-on experience that has always marked Bold’s culture, such as the On Job Experience process itself. It simply ensures that this knowledge, previously concentrated in whoever had been there longer, now exists in a structured way, accessible to anyone, at any restaurant, at any time.
Technologies and resources that can support this design
This proposal relies on a specific set of Happmobi platform features, each addressing a concrete part of the identified challenge.
By bringing together segmented learning paths, automatic traceability and direct communication on a single platform, the expectation is that training will no longer depend exclusively on the availability of experienced leaders at each unit, and will instead be sustained by a structure that keeps pace with the company’s expansion.
With a training structure capable of scaling alongside the operation, Bold Hospitality Company gains more freedom to think about growth without treating training as a bottleneck. This makes room for the company to keep pursuing its expansion goal, including new markets in Latin America, with the confidence that the culture that built its reputation can travel along with it.
In the end, what sustains a hospitality brand was never just the menu or the decor of each location — it was always the way each team member treats the person sitting at the table. Investing in a learning structure that keeps pace with Bold Hospitality Company’s growth is, above all, a way of protecting what made the brand one of the most beloved in Brazil: people who truly understand what it means to care for another person.
+ 15000
Foodservice — holding company for casual dining and fast-casual restaurant chains (American steakhouse, Italian cuisine and chicken sandwiches)
From the learner experience to manager governance: Happmobi’s features were designed to simplify L&D operations and accelerate learning results.