Papa Johns shares huge update after closing 40 high street restaurant branches

The high street pizza chain Papa Johns has shared a major update after being forced to close over 40 sites over the last year.

The UK boss of the pizza giant has shared that the company is set to return to profit for the first time since 2021, this year. Papa Johns managing director Chris Phylactou has recently confirmed that the firm was "no longer losing money”.

Speaking on an upcoming episode of podcast, the pizza chain boss shared that two of Papa John's largest partners flagged the risk of insolvency during 2023.

He said: "We took a strategic decision to acquire those and we kept those restaurants for nearly a year. We tried to look at which ones we could turn around and fortunately 60 of them were really good.

“We franchised them internally to incumbent franchisees, 13 of them we’ve kept under corporate ownership, but unfortunately 43 of them we’ve had to close. Closing restaurants is never an easy decision.

It’s the last thing we ever want to do. It’s a lot of jobs, particularly when people’s livelihoods are at stake. But if restaurants perform performing badly and losing a lot of money, sometimes the best decision is to close them.”

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Papa Johns is the UK's second largest pizza takeaway brand - sitting behind The first UK Papa Johns stores opened in Essex in 1999 and in 2013 it opened it's 200 UK store.

At the start of 2024, Papa Johns owned 118 branches and 406 franchise stores. However, in 2023, Papa Johns closed 22 branches but opened 15 new sites. The UK arm of Papa Johns lost almost £20million in the year to October 2024, with a pre-tax of £19.9million in 2023 and a £4.1million loss in 2022.

This is when Papa Johns announced the plans to close stores which Chris Phylactou said was a "difficult decision". He said: "Having people lose their jobs is the last option for us. We tried everything to keep the restaurants open.”

He added: “It’s never an easy decision and something that I wasn’t happy doing, but it’s something that we had to do as a brand. We held on to the restaurants probably longer than we should have to protect the people for as long as we could.

“And we put a lot of effort into trying those trying to turn those businesses around. But unfortunately, they were even the wrong location and the performance of the restaurants was really bad. So there was no business case to keep them open.”

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