SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA ENTERPRISE : Fast-Food Eatery Offers Pizza With Latin Twist : Franchise: La Pizza Loca will open its first international location in Guatemala City in July.

When Alex Meruelo opened his first pizza restaurant, no one was making fast-food deliveries in the neighborhood. The perception, he said, was that the heavily Latino area of Huntington Park was simply too dangerous.

But Meruelo, a Cuban American, disagreed. Since 1986, he has defied that convention and in doing so has built a successful business. His La Pizza Loca chain now has 54 outlets in three states with annual sales of more than $22 million.

The Buena Park-based company serves Latino enclaves across California, Texas and Florida. And now Meruelo has his eye on another market: Latin America. La Pizza Loca’s first international location is to open its doors in Guatemala City in July, and nine other openings in that Central American nation are planned for the next four years.

“Guatemala is not the richest country in the world,” Meruelo said Monday, “but neither is the Hispanic population in the (United States), and we are making money making pizza for them.”

La Pizza Loca also has franchising agreements in El Salvador, company spokesman Tony Tavantzis said, and is aggressively seeking opportunities across Central and South America.

Tavantzis and Meruelo attribute the company’s success to making a product especially suited to Latin tastes. Pepperoni, the customary meat for pizza, is the favorite of La Pizza Loca customers; they also can choose carne asada, refried beans and chili toppings.

And the company regularly creates special meals with the Latino family in mind, Tavantzis said. That means remembering that Latino families typically are large and offering two pizzas for one price.

The company also considers other cultural differences, he said. For example, La Pizza Loca never offers discount coupons through local newspapers as some competitors do.

“Hispanics don’t like to use coupons because they consider it degrading,” Tavantzis said. “We just offer the best price without coupons, and offer specials.”

When the company makes its move south of the border, the business plan will be identical to the one that has served it so well in the United States, Tavantzis said.

Competitors in Mexican-style food say that strategy is likely to serve the company well.

“Hispanic consumers like things geared toward their tastes,” said Ray Perry, president of El Pollo Loco, a fast-food chain that serves Mexican-style chicken dishes. “Specifically, they like products from their homeland.”

Though pizza originated in Italy, Perry said, La Pizza Loca has succeeded because it grasped quickly that selling to the Latino market means developing products for specific customers.

Perry added that other pizza chains, though they may advertise in Spanish, have created few products with the extra spices that appeal to the Latino palate.

Though Mexican food has been increasingly popular with U.S. consumers in the 1990s, La Pizza Loca does not plan to exploit that trend. In fact, it is sticking to its initial plan to focus on one segment of the fast-food market rather than seek to broaden its appeal.

The company has made an effort to let consumers know, through its ads in the Spanish-language media, that it is Latin owned and operated and that, when customers call to place an order, they can do so in their native tongue.

Having people who are fluent in Spanish available to take phone orders has been another ingredient of La Pizza Loca’s success, Tavantzis said. As anyone who has learned a second language knows, communicating over the phone is much more difficult than speaking in person, said Tavantzis, who came to the United States from Chile in 1981.

“In person,” he said, “you can gesture and point if you need to, but you can’t do that on the phone. So lots of non-English speakers don’t feel comfortable ordering takeout.”