The president of a restaurant chain has apologized to Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez III for a recent post on social media that attributed the price increase of its food products to last year’s temporary inflation spike and insinuated that the government was to blame for it.

Eduardo Firmalo, the president of Frankie’s New York Buffalo Wings, said the company fully understands that it must be responsible for whatever comes out of its social media channels and assured Dominguez “that we have taken measures to avoid any similar incidents from happening again.”

Firmalo was referring to Frankie’s New York Buffalo Wings’ tweet last Jan. 14, which has since been deleted. The tweet was in response to a complaint about the price increase of its products sent to its Twitter account.

Frankie’s has publicly apologized for the tweet, which wrongly attributed the price increase to the temporary elevated inflation rate last year. It clarified through its Twitter account that the price increase was the result of “many internal and external factors.”

“We would like to express once more that the tweet was unintentional and was not approved by management. Upon seeing the tweet, we immediately asked our Social Media Specialist to remove the post because it did not reflect the views of management,” Firmalo said in his letter to Dominguez dated June 6.

Firmalo also said in his June 6 letter that “we recognize our government’s efforts to provide a better economic environment for the country and are fully supportive of its programs.”

“Once again, on behalf of our entire organization, we humbly and sincerely apologize for any misconception that the tweet made,” the letter read.

Firmalo explained in his letter that the tweet was posted by their social media specialist, who had been with the company for only two months and failed to coordinate with management on how to properly respond to the complaint.

“Disciplinary action was meted out to the said employee and he has since been terminated from our employment. We have also sent out an internal memo to all our employees to be more responsible with the use of our brand’s name,” Firmalo said.

The inflation rate, which rose to 4.3 percent in March 2018 and reached 6.7 percent in September, began declining in November last year following the implementation by President Duterte of an array of several directives to check price spikes.

Inflation went down to 3.8 percent in February this year and continued its downward trend in March at 3.3 percent, 3.0 percent in April 2019 and 3.2 percent in May, well within this year’s official inflation target of between 2 and 4 percent.

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