Eduardo Robayo Ferro, founder of AVESCO Ltd. company on Aug. 9, 1969, and who built it into Kokoriko, Colombia’s most recognized roasted chicken chain and the country’s first nationally scaled fast-food operation, died on March 21, 2026, according to the company’s official social media channels and confirmed by sector associations.
Colombia’s gastronomic industry described his death as the loss of one of the few entrepreneurs who shaped the country’s food culture before international chains arrived.
Robayo Ferro launched AVESCO together with co-founders Noe Cardona Cardona and Emilio Jordan Collazos in a small counter called Las Colonias at Calle 63 with Avenida Caracas in Bogota, where the three partners sold roasted chicken with potato and arepa at a time when no Colombian chain had yet standardized that format nationally.
The combination’s immediate commercial traction convinced Robayo that a replicable, low-cost menu could anchor a brand across cities with very different purchasing power and food traditions.
Murió a los 91 años el fundador de Kokoriko, Eduardo Robayo Ferro, políticos, emprendedores y diversas personalidades han lamentado su partida.https://t.co/2YaHqwQKQn
— El Colombiano (@elcolombiano) March 22, 2026
From a Bogota counter to a national chain
The first restaurant operating under the Kokoriko name opened in Cali in 1971, and Colombia’s roasted chicken tradition as a commercial category effectively dates from that moment, since Robayo and his brother Antonio Robayo took the lead of the company and applied what Guillermo Henrique Gomez Paris, president of the Asociación Colombiana de Gastronomía Acoga, described as a vision “previous to the economic opening of the 1990s,” building a Colombian-born chain leader before market liberalization brought multinational competition.
The Colombian fast-food model Robayo built relied on two things that international chains would later replicate at larger scale: Process standardization, which Kokoriko formalized with ISO 9001 certification, and geographic expansion beyond the capital, with the brand reaching Medellin, Barranquilla, Cartagena, and Manizales before most Colombian food entrepreneurs treated those cities as viable franchise markets, growing to more than 100 points of sale in the chain’s most active decades.
Finance, pension funds, and a diversified business group
From the 1980s onward, Robayo Ferro and his family used the cash flow and institutional credibility that Kokoriko had generated to enter Colombian finance, acquiring Diners Club Colombia in a move that placed the family at the center of the country’s credit industry at a moment when consumer credit was still consolidating as a retail product; Diners Club subsequently became Banco Superior before its absorption by Davivienda, one of Colombia’s three largest banks today.
Robayo Ferro remained a partner of at least 17 companies across sectors including pension funds, housing, and consumer goods throughout his career, always with Kokoriko as the symbolic and operational anchor of the group, and Gomez Paris stated that Robayo’s “constant support, especially in the most critical moments of the industry,” defined his relationship with Colombia’s gastronomic sector as much as the brand he created.
In 2000, the group incorporated Helados Mimo’s and consolidated the Conboca conglomerate, which in 2016 formed an alliance with Andres Jaramillo, founder of Andres Carne de Res, and in 2017 merged into Grupo Empresarial IGA, the structure that today operates Kokoriko across 80 points of sale in 18 cities with one active franchise, alongside Andres Carne de Res and Mimo’s under a single corporate roof.
The Colombian fast-food model Eduardo Robayo built did not survive intact under family ownership, and the eventual sale into a larger conglomerate structure is itself a measure of how far the market he helped create outgrew the founding logic of a family-run chicken counter on a Bogota avenue.
What endures after the Kokoriko founder died is a brand that Colombia’s consumers still associate with a specific plate, a specific price architecture, and the commercial instinct of a merchant who started with costume jewelry and finished with a bank, a roasted chicken chain, and a category he essentially invented.