Papa Johns International, Inc. has been in the midst of a long development runway for several years now, as the Louisville, Ky.-based pizza chain catches up and tries to surpass its pre-2020 store portfolio levels. This year, Papa Johns reached the same number of stores it had before the pandemic, so now the company is at ground zero on its journey toward one day becoming the third-largest pizza chain in the U.S., Patrick Coelho, senior vice president of development for Papa Johns, said.
Although last year, store openings were fairly modest, with only 15 net new stores opened in 2022, according to the NRN 2023 Top 500 in partnership with Datassential, Papa Johns has signed multiple large development deals over the past couple of years, and in 2022, CEO Rob Lynch said that the company has plans to open 2,000 stores by 2025. The plan is to utilize new store designs, as well as nontraditional locations, to get the company back on track to the same pace of growth it has in the ‘90s.