—by Rob Gurwitt

Hanover, 8/29/23

Boloco, the burrito chain whose shop on Main Street in Hanover has for nearly two decades been a go-to lunch and dinner spot for Dartmouth students and community members alike, is winding down its Boston operations; by year’s end, the Hanover spot will be one of just two Bolocos left. Friday was the last day for the company’s store by the Berklee College of Music in Boston—where it first set up shop nearly 27 years ago. “This is a tough one,” co-founder and owner John Pepper wrote to Boloco staffers and former employees in a Facebook post that day. “It feels like a funeral in some ways, and a celebration in others.”

By year’s end, Pepper says, two other locations in the city will close, leaving just its spots at Boston Children’s Hospital and in Hanover. At Boloco’s peak a decade ago, it had 22 locations across New England, as well as in Maryland and DC.

In a conversation with Daybreak, Pepper said on Friday that his decision to close the Boston locations coincided with their leases coming due. “It’s become a challenging business climate for us. We’re doing well, but we’re not thriving. We don’t have that mojo we used to have. The end of a lease, those are stopping points for a lot of us.”

As it happens, Boloco is also in the midst of renegotiating the lease for its Hanover spot, which opened in 2004 as the company expanded. And though Pepper intends for the moment to keep things going there, it’s proving an uphill struggle. “We’re on incredibly good terms with our landlords,” Pepper says. “But the challenge is we can’t find a manager.” He’s been searching for seven months—ever since the last manager left. “And this is despite six-figure total compensation and looking outside the Upper Valley,” he adds. “I’ve never seen anything like that. It’s either something difficult about Boloco, or maybe the labor market is as challenging as we hear it is.”

In addition, finding reliable full-time employees who are committed to the business has proven tough. “I have an incredible number of part-time students, but without a core group of full-timers, it becomes very hard to operate a busy restaurant like Boloco in a safe, quick, reputable manner,” he says. This is especially irksome because business is back to pre-pandemic levels. “Sales are super-strong in Hanover,” he says.

Boloco—which Pepper, a Tuck School grad and Hanover resident, founded in 1997 with three colleagues by Pepper—has never been entirely about the bottom line. “A big reason for being in the [fast casual restaurant] business was I felt like there was an opportunity to make a difference by building a business model that could pay much higher wages and be sustainable,” he says. Long before the rest of the industry was forced to catch up by the post-pandemic labor shortage, Boloco paid its workers well above minimum wage. “If we really wanted our people to care about our culture and care about our customers, we had to show that we cared about them,” Pepper told the NYT in 2014 (gift link). “If we’re talking about building a business that’s successful, but our employees can’t go home and pay their bills, to me that success is a farce.”

These days, he notes, “wages [in the industry] have gone through the roof. I applaud that, but we don’t have the same advantages other companies do.” The company almost folded during the pandemic, and keeping it going since has been a struggle, he notes. As he wrote in Friday’s Facebook post, “Every day since Covid hit, the big question for me has been ‘Do we fight to keep Boloco going or do we give in to the various forces that seem to be working against us?’”

For now, he says, he wants to keep Hanover open. “The thing that keeps me going is, does Boloco serve an important purpose in the community? Do we support the things that happen, the ChaD Hero or the Prouty or all the different groups that ask us? ‘Yes’ has always been our default answer. I hate losing the tool that allows me to be part of the community in that way.”