Panda express biography

The gig: Peggy Cherng, 66, is co-chair and co-chief executive of Panda Restaurant Group, one of the most recognizable Chinese restaurant chains in the world. The Rosemead-based firm, which owns Panda Express, operates 1,800 eateries and employs 26,000 people. The privately held company reached $2.2 billion in revenue last year, nearly doubling in just four years.

Immigrant success story: Cherng was born in Myanmar, also known as Burma, and raised in Hong Kong. She moved to the United States for college. She met her Chinese-born husband, Andrew Cherng, her freshman year at Baker University in Kansas. Andrew and his father, Ming-Tsai Cherng, went on to run a restaurant in Pasadena called Panda Inn. Peggy Cherng has a graduate degree in electrical engineering and worked for 3M and McDonnell Douglas, where she was coding simulators for the U.S. Navy, before joining the family business full time in the early 1980s after the death of her father-in-law. When the owner of the Glendale Galleria proposed that the pair open a quick-serve location in his mall, the Cherngs pounced on the opportunity. That first Panda Express opened in 1983, launching a stir-fry empire. “We’re a Chinese American company,” Cherng said.

Family business: Panda is one of the largest privately held restaurant chains. The company considered going public in the 1990s. “Luckily we didn’t,” Cherng said. “Our business mentality is to focus on people and food and less on profit. If we went public, maybe we would have had to change our philosophy.” Cherng said she was satisfied with the profit margin, which she described as over 10%.

Organizational master: While her husband was focused on expanding stores, Cherng was in charge of developing a system to streamline operations at the restaurants. By 1983, she introduced a system commonly known today as “point of sale,” in which staff can punch in meal orders on a compu

In 1973, Andrew and Peggy Cherng, along with Andrew's father, chef Ming-Tsai Cherng, opened a modest restaurant called Panda Inn in Pasadena, California. Hailing from Yangzhou, China, Ming-Tsai had worked in kitchens in Taipei and Yokohama in the '50s and '60s, and Andrew helped his father run Ting Ho in Los Angeles in 1972. The family opened four more Panda Inns, before opening the first Panda Express in the Glendale Galleria mall in 1983. 

In the early 1980s, Asian-American food as a fast food concept was pretty scarce. The Cherngs incorporated computers and menu data analysis early on, and instituted wellness and business training programs for its staff almost from the beginning. Thanks to this deliberately customized and tech-forward concept, the restaurant quickly took off.

But it's the food that draws people toward a Panda Express. The goal was not to recreate authentic Chinese dishes, but to make Chinese American food that appeals to a large audience. Andrew and Peggy's daughter, Andrea Cherng is the company's CMO and told Business Insider that the restaurant reflected a long tradition of Chinese chefs using traditional culinary experience and skills to create dishes that appeal to an American palate. This tradition has outlasted Ming-Tsai's run of the kitchen. In 1987, chef Andy Kao (originally from Taiwan) created the store's signature orange chicken, inspired by dishes from the Hunan province. It's still very popular and widely mimicked — there's even a Trader Joe's version you can easily upgrade.

American restaurant company

Panda Restaurant Group, Inc. is the parent company of Panda Inn, Panda Express and Hibachi-San. It was founded by Andrew and Peggy Tsiang Cherng and Andrew's father, Master Chef Ming-Tsai Cherng; the family originated from the Yangzhou region of China's Jiangsu province. They started their first Panda Inn restaurant in 1973 in Pasadena, California. Ten years later a developer of the new Glendale Galleria mall, a frequent patron of Panda Inn, asked Andrew to start a fast-service version of his restaurant in the new mall. In 1985 the store went from five locations to nine in just one year.

The group's headquarters is located in Rosemead, California. Panda Express is the largest Asian-American restaurant chain in the United States, with 2,200 branches. In 2019 Panda Express opened its first branch in Manila, Philippines, as a joint venture between the Panda Restaurant Group and Jollibee Foods Corp., JBPX Foods.

Andrew Cherng and his wife Peggy Tsiang Cherng met at Baker University in Baldwin City, Kansas. Peggy Cherng went on to receive her B.S. degree in Mathematics from Oregon State University in 1971 and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Missouri. The company debuted on Forbes' 20