Welcome back to cheddar news. Everyone, papa john's
cooking up some fresh changes. The pizza chain has
rolled out a brand new logo and graphics look and
brick and mortar locations will be transformed to streamline the
customer experience. This comes as the company continues to
show strength recently, marking nine consecutive quarters of global
growth and joining us now is rob lynch ceo of
papa john's rob, thanks so much for joining us
here on cheddar news, wondering if you can walk
us through this rebrand and some of the different concepts
that you're focusing on in addition to what we mentioned
, you know, thank you for having me,
it's great to be on the show. Um you
know, papa john's has had a great couple of
years as the pandemic has challenged the way we,
you know, come together and enjoy food. Pizza
has been something that, that you know, America
and really globally people have been able to kind of
cling to, to get delivered safely to your home
and and, and and enjoy some, enjoy a
meal with your family. So right now we're looking
towards the future and how we keep that growth going
and what we aspire to be and we felt like
it was the right time for us To drive some
change into the visual identity of the brand. We're
building a lot of restaurants this year, we're gonna
build about 250 restaurants globally next year, we plan
to build even more so as we build these new
restaurants, we want them to be grounded in the
identity that we want to have for the long term
. Um and something that we feel just makes it
more engaging, makes it more approachable and that's really
what's been driving that the timing around us rebranding the
brand right now. It's really interesting and I want
to talk with you a bit about the restaurants in
their physical capacity, but something that struck me was
that you are building a lot of these new restaurants
, How do you balance that with your digital strategy
? Especially after something like this pandemic? Well,
you know, we're in E- Commerce company at hardly
about 80% of our orders are placed digitally. Um
but all of those orders need to be made somewhere
, papa john's is unique in the restaurant industry that
all of our ingredients are fresh. Make all of
our food fresh right when you order it. So
it's really important that we have great restaurants where we
can make the orders that are going to be delivered
to people's homes. So You know about 40% of
our business is carried out. So our customers are
coming into our restaurants, we want to make sure
that our restaurants are good representation of our brand and
and and how we want to be perceived moving forward
. Gotcha! And a part of that representation,
as we mentioned, some really fascinating changes to the
physical brick and mortar stores. You're going to be
doing away with the menu boards at physical locations.
Also installing some glass panels so customers can see the
pizzas being made. Why are these physical changes really
important? Oh, you know, we, like
I said, we make everything fresh. We want
our customers to see that we, we don't have
anything to hide. There's no artificial colors, no
artificial ingredients in any of our food. So,
um, we want people to see that when they
order a pizza where our folks are right there using
fresh ingredients to make their food right in front of
them. In terms of no menu boards, Everyone
has a menu board in their pocket and form of
their phone. Like I said, 80% of our
business is ordered digitally, whether it's web based or
most, you know, our fastest growing channel being
at based. So, um, everyone kind of
knows what they want to order when they come in
and if they don't, they've got the menu right
there on their phone. All right. And I'm
also wondering how papa jOHn's is being affected by some
of this economic climate we're experiencing right now. It
can be challenging. We have inflation around a lot
of food items specifically, There's a labor shortage.
How are you coping with some of those changes that
were experiencing, but also keeping your prices stable for
customers who go to papa john's for reasonable prices well
throughout the pandemic. We've aspired to be the employer
of choice in our industry. We've added a lot
of benefits for our employees, including free college tuition
, virtual health care for everybody retention and referral bonuses
to bring in new new employees. We've hired over
30,000 people in the last two years. So we're
always looking for ways that we can do things that
make people want to be a part of our brand
, This brand identity and revitalization is part of that
. It really is signaling that Papa John's is a
, is a company that cares about our future,
cares about how we come together as a team teammates
across over 3500 restaurants domestically and 2200 internationally. And
so we're always going to try and make sure that
we're taking care of our employees first and foremost.
And I think that helps us as labor becomes more
challenging to come by in terms of the supply chain
in terms of inflation on the ingredients. You know
, we've, we've done a lot, we've grown
a lot over the last couple of years and were
vertically integrated supply chain. So we work with our
suppliers to make sure we have what we need and
then we've become a lot more productive, which is
, you know, spread out our fixed costs,
which has allowed us to cut our costs to our
restaurants, which then allows us to keep our prices
down rob. You mentioned international locations. So gotta
ask, are there any plans in terms of expansion
internationally? Absolutely. We're expanding every day. We're
opening a new more than one new restaurant every day
right now. So um we are in over 50
countries internationally. We want to be in over 100
countries internationally. We're working with franchisees partners to bring
our brand, the countries like Australia and brazil and
France and Japan, our biggest markets outside of the
U. S. Are the UK china spain chile
is a big market for us. So we have
a we have a lot of penetration uh internationally but
we see a lot of upside and some of that
white space rob before we let you go, we
mentioned a bit earlier, a lot of the growth
and stellar earnings that you've been seeing over previous quarters
. Um Strong third quarter earnings for you, beating
on both the top and bottom lines. This most
recent quarter, your ninth consecutive quarter of global growth
. How do you plan for the company to maintain
a lot of that strength um that you've seen endure
through the pandemic, the worst of it and beyond
? Yeah. And when I joined the company back
in 2019, 1 of the first things we focused
on was getting clear on what our strategic priorities were
. What were we gonna focus on that was going
to make us the kind of company that we aspired
to be and throughout the pandemic, those have never
changed. Um They've just accelerated. It's really about
us building a culture of leaders who believe in diversity
inclusion and winning about making sure we have the technology
infrastructure to be successful in the future, bringing our
brand of life and highlighting the better ingredients story and
improving our unit economics for our franchisees because if they're
not winning, we can't win and then expanding domestically
and globally. None of those strategies have changed.
We're just more focused on them and and actually getting
better at delivering against all of them every day,
rob, congrats on this rebrand and expansion. I'm
getting hungry just talking about pizza. So that's rob
, lynch ceo of papa, john's. Thanks so
much again.