As a take-and-bake pizza chain where customers make their food at home, Papa Murphy’s has no real need for seats.
That isn’t keeping the Vancouver, Wash.-based chain from doing the same thing so many other chains are doing: Shifting the focus of a new prototype toward the kitchen and away from customer areas. The new prototype is a big departure from Papa Murphy's traditional model, replacing its Subway-like counter assembly line with a more traditional makeline in the back.
“Our older concept was an L-shaped concept,” Victoria Tullett, senior vice president of development for Papa Murphy’s, said in an interview. “It’s similar to Subway in that we make it in front of you. But that’s a lot of room in the lobby. What we learned is that it’s nice but it’s not really important. It’s more efficient to have all of that in the back of the house.”
The company announced its long-awaited prototype, called “Kitchen Delite,” late last month. The idea behind the design is to “reintroduce” customers to the concept while also improving efficiency and giving delivery and digital customers a new pickup option. It also comes with a new logo that is more readable and loses some of the green color from the chain’s old red-and-green version.
Papa Murphy’s has been working on the prototype for some time, before the pandemic and even before the chain’s 2019 sale to the Canadian brand collector MTY Global. “We kind of took a pause,” Tullett said. “We were having some internal challenges with leadership when we were bought by MTY.”
The company had been working for more than a year on the prototype when the pandemic hit. The months of quarantine helped the chain’s sales improve—Papa Murphy’s U.S. system sales rose 6.5% last year despite the closure of more than 2% of its restaurants.
Tullett estimates that 500 of the chain’s 1,300 mostly franchised units are in need of some sort of remodel. To get operators to do this, the company has a smaller refresh option that is cheaper. It is also providing an incentive—paying a quarter of the cost of the remodel. It will pay up to $10,000 for the standard remodel and up to $50,000 for the full version.
“We hope that incentive will be enough to pull owners to remodel by the end of 2022,” Tullett said.
At least five locations are currently operating under the new prototype, executives said.
The new prototype has a smaller lobby and a bigger kitchen. And although it loses the counter assembly line, customers will still be able to see their pizzas being made—it has an open kitchen so they can see everything happening in the back. That’s a key point in an era in which transparency is important to customers.
The new prototype is designed to improve efficiency in the same 1,200- to 1,400-square-foot space. “If you’ve seen it during the busy times, with five to six people on the line, imagine the inefficiency of having five or six people on the long line,” Tullett said. “Having it in the back-of-house makes more sense.”
The open concept features make lines in the middle and on the side and brought the mixer to the back from the front, where it had been as a demonstration of the pizza’s freshness. Much like the counter assembly line, the company found that to be “nice” but unnecessary.
It also features something the chain hasn’t had before: Space for employees. “Having a place for them to have a glass of water or plug in their phone to check messages or do training, we want that to happen,” Tullett said. “If we don’t create a space for them, they’ll create it.”
The design also takes into account digital and delivery that have become more important in the past two years. That makes it important for Papa Murphy’s, a traditionally pick-it-up concept, to shift its prototype.
The chain created a pickup rack system where pizzas are fed from the back and customers pull them out of the front. “We had a solution working out of necessity, but it didn’t do justice to the product and experience,” Tullett said. “We wanted to take it up a notch.”
