Mad Mex: Guilt-free Mexican Fast-Food

Mad Mex founder and head Clovis Young

If you’re a fan of fast and fresh Mexican street food, you're probably familiar with the popular food chain Mad Mex. With more than 70 restaurants in Australia and New Zealand, Mad Mex offers a range of Baja-style Mexican food that’s fresh, healthy, fast and delicious. Plus, it’s served-up in eco-friendly BioPak sugarcane pulp packaging, so you can enjoy your Mexican food fix –guilt-free.

Founder and head honcho Clovis Young grew up in San Diego, and it was his family holidays to Baja, and his early awareness of the consumer demand for a nutrition-driven fast-food that inspired him to launch Mad Mex.

Operating in a highly competitive market, Mad Mex has continually evolved and improved the business to maintain and grow its market share. Customer experience has been essential to this evolution, from the hip interior design of the restaurants to the sustainable packaging that holds the food, every customer touchpoint is considered.

Elevating the customer experience with packaging.

As a quick-service restaurant, food packaging and presentation is a massive part of the customer experience. With consumer awareness and support for sustainable-living practices growing by the day, good-looking, eco-friendly packaging is essential for Mad Mex. In fact, owner Clovis Young said that eco-friendly business practices have been an important focus for Mad Mex right from the beginning.

After all, everyone should be aware and conscious of how they're treating the environment, and we want to do our part whether that's on-site recycling, the use of non-bleached paper packaging or our biodegradable serving trays – it all adds up to being a good citizen”, Young told QSR Media.

Eco-friendly practices essential to business growth.

Mad Mex recognized the growing support for sustainable living – especially amongst health-conscious consumers – and engaged BioPak to help move away from generic plastic packaging ubiquitous in the fast-food industry, and instead develop custom-designed sustainable packaging.

The innovations that BioPak delivered Mad Mex offered several advantages, among them sustainably sourced and rapidly renewable plant-based raw materials, and the fact that all BioPak products are carbon neutral. Plus, the packaging served not only to reinforce the brand’s distinct personality but also enhance the visual appeal of the food.

In addition to using BioPak’s plant-based bioplastic cutlery, Mad Mex original tasked BioPak with designing two custom sugarcane pulp trays to replace the existing plastic containers in 2014. Mad Mex and BioPak have been working on a new 4 compartment, family-sized, do-it-yourself taco kit, which will launch in stores for delivery soon! 

Made fresh to order, the kit comes with tacos, fillings, salsa, black beans, pico de gallo, cheese, lettuce, and sour cream.

This first-of-its-kind design has an incredibly unique functionality and is currently with the Patent Office (Patent Pending).

The need for speed: a fast and efficient process.

From initial CAD designs, prototypes were produced within two weeks for an in-store trial; the resulting feedback was used to make adjustments to improve functional performance and optimize portion sizes before full production went ahead.

After final product approval, BioPak ramped up production and had inventory at each of their warehouse locations to fulfil orders for every Mad Mex Franchise in Australia.

The most important metric: customer satisfaction improvement

The trays have been a success, and customer feedback has been positive. An additional benefit of partnering with BioPak is that Mad Mex has offset their packaging carbon emissions in 2017 by 395 tonnes and diverted 51 tonnes of plastic from landfill.

Mad Mex continues to grow as more Australians develop a love for freshly prepared, healthy and tasty Mexican foods. Choosing plant-based packaging is just one way in which the company is committed to developing a sustainable business model.

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