Burger Burger, the chain that grew out of a 50-seat Ponsonby restaurant into seven stores across the upper North Island, has been placed into liquidation after a five-week rescue attempt failed to produce a buyer.
Burger Burger Limited and Burger Burger IP Limited were both put into liquidation on 24 July, RNZ reported. A notice published in the New Zealand Gazette on Monday gives creditors until 21 August to lodge their claims and establish any priority those claims may carry, the Otago Daily Times reported.
The chain owed about $1.8 million when the trouble became public in June, a figure that covered debts to suppliers, unpaid rent and GST. It employed close to 90 people at the time.
The collapse ran in three stages. Receivers were appointed on 18 June after a landlord chased rent arrears and called in a loan taken out to cover fit-out costs. Adam Botterill of Waterstone Insolvency, appointed alongside Damien Grant, said that creditor alone was owed more than $160,000. Director Mimi Gilmour told RNZ at the time that the total owed was around $1.8 million and that she was trying to sell the business as a going concern.
“We’ve just gone through the worst two years of trading along with everybody else, and the pressure just kept building, and we tried to find some solutions, and every single solution that I’ve exercised has fallen through,” Gilmour said in June.
She said spending in restaurants had dropped “through the floor”. “The last five years have just been brutal. Our cost of goods have increased, our wages have increased, your rent keeps increasing, spending has recovered a bit and then dropped again when the war hit. There’s so many factors.”
Her assessment of the maths facing the whole sector was blunter still. “We can’t sell burgers for $30. It’s not going to work.”
The trading company then moved into voluntary administration, with Gareth Hoole and Raymond Cox of Ecovis KGA appointed joint administrators. Hoole kept five of the six trading outlets open while he looked for a buyer and told the NZ Herald the brand needed a capital injection of about $1 million to be rebuilt. In their report to creditors the administrators said finding a purchaser offered the best pathway to protect the brand, and that three parties had shown enough interest to justify due diligence and work on new lease arrangements.
None of those three converted into a sale. Once the buyer search ran out, liquidation followed.
Burger Burger opened its first store in Ponsonby in 2014, built around a simple pitch of honest burgers and quality ingredients at a price ordinary people would pay. It expanded steadily through Auckland and into Hamilton and Mount Maunganui, and opened a Commercial Bay site in downtown Auckland in 2020. The retrenchment started well before the receivership. The company shut its flagship Newmarket store in late 2025, and the Christchurch site on Welles Street closed in the same period.
Trade publication Restaurant & Café reported that a 70 percent rise in meat prices over 18 months, layered on top of higher wage costs, had put severe strain on the operation. That combination is the specific squeeze a burger chain cannot escape. Beef is the product, wages are the service, and neither can be swapped out for something cheaper without the customer noticing.
The wider numbers explain why the rescue attempt was always going to be hard. Electronic card spending figures from Stats NZ show retail spending fell 1.4 percent in June, a drop of $98 million on the month. Hospitality, which covers cafes, restaurants, bars and takeaways, was down $28 million or 1.9 percent. Groceries were the only retail category to rise, up 0.4 percent. Households have not stopped buying food. They have stopped buying it from someone else.
Company failures are running at levels not seen in more than a decade. Just over 3,000 liquidations were recorded in the year to May, up 14 percent on the year before, and credit bureau Centrix expects the full-year total to be the highest since 2010. Chief operating officer Monika Lacey has said hospitality is one of the most vulnerable sectors, and the sector-level figures bear that out. Liquidations of cafes, restaurants and bars have been rising at roughly three times the pace of the overall total, as we reported in our breakdown of failures by industry.
Restaurants sit at the sharp end of any downturn because they sell something households can simply choose not to buy. A supermarket can pass on a rates rise. A rent increase for a 50-seat restaurant has to come out of the price of a burger, and there is a ceiling on what people will pay for one. Add debt carried since the pandemic, wage costs that can reach 40 percent of revenue before rent, power and food are counted, and there is very little room left for anything to go wrong.
For the staff and suppliers now waiting on the liquidators, the practical question is what is left. The Gazette notice sets 21 August as the date by which claims must be in. Employees hold a preferential claim for wages and holiday pay up to a statutory cap, ahead of ordinary unsecured creditors, but behind secured lenders. In a business where a single landlord was owed more than $160,000, the ordinary suppliers who kept the kitchens running are unlikely to see much back.
Burger Burger was not a marginal operator. It was a well-known brand with a loyal following, prime sites and 12 years of trading behind it. That is the part of this story worth sitting with. When a chain of that profile cannot make the numbers work, the problem is not the burgers.
Have you noticed your local restaurants getting quieter, or has a favourite spot near you closed its doors this year? Tell us what you are seeing in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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