By Charlie Pogacar
It’s happening: For the first time in its 13-year history, &pizza will start growing via franchising. And no one’s more excited about it than CEO Mike Burns.
The news was embargoed until 6 a.m. Thursday, March 20, but it was hardly a secret. When Burns was named CEO of &pizza about two years ago, he was public about the brand’s intentions to eventually franchise. First, though, Burns spent months quietly observing the brand with a fresh set of eyes. What he saw—and he’s been very candid about it—was a once-dynamic brand that had lost its way. That was a shame because he thought &pizza, in the most basic sense, was perfect for accelerated growth via franchising.
“Over the past several years, &pizza began to drift from its counterculture roots, which originally defined its place in the industry,” Burns said via press release. Now the CEO, whose tenure began amidst a comprehensive overhaul of &pizza’s technological and marketing strategies, believes the brand has gotten back to what it used to be—and then some—and it was time to start franchising. “We lost our voice, and mainstream became our normal. My directive when I came on board was to inject energy back into the brand and get us to where we once were. We’re back!”
Related: CEO Mike Burns Wants to Get &pizza Back to Its Radical Roots
With about 45 company-owned locations in its current portfolio, &pizza will aim to add 300 more by 2030. To get there, the chain will refranchise most of its existing units while holding on to somewhere between 5-to-10 locations that will serve as corporately owned test kitchens, if you will, to demo anything new the brand wants to try. If they can prove it is profitable and easily executed in that handful of restaurants, it will be rolled out systemwide.
“It allows us to test things,” Burns told PMQ Pizza in an interview this week. “If [I have] a franchisee, and I’m telling them—and I’m completely making this up—hey, we’re going to add buffalo wings to the menu and your new fryer is going to cost $300,000, they’re naturally going to ask, ‘Well, what’s my ROI?’ If I have no company-owned restaurants, I have nothing to say. So that’s why we’re doing it that way, where we want to build a company-owned restaurant for every eight franchised locations we open.”
It’s important to note, though, that refranchising will (most likely) only occur in markets where a prospective franchisee will be signing on to grow the brand. In other words, &pizza is looking for the right local people to take over a market, starting with stores that already exist. It will also be signing franchisees that are dedicated to growing new markets for the brand, and Burns has some of those in mind—but more on that later.
When it comes to selecting franchisees, the company will emphasize cultural fit over conventional experience, preferring partners with diverse business portfolios who are deeply integrated into their local communities. “This local integration is crucial, as &pizza prides itself on being a community-centric brand, far removed from the ‘Big Pizza’ label,” Burns said.
“From a franchisee standpoint, we think Charlotte, North Carolina, for example, is a great market for us,” Burns continued. “Well, I really want the person operating those restaurants to be living in Charlotte. I want them to be living and breathing the community. So we’re going to be super selective on who we choose to do that with, but I think this will allow us to grow significantly faster and have a pulse on what’s actually happening in that community. Because that’s what &pizza is all about: being a part of the community.”
Every choice Burns and his team made over the past two years focused on franchisee profitability. For example, &pizza brought back popular menu items that had been booted from the menu because they had been deemed too operationally challenging. Burns and his team instead found ways to make those same menu items in a less labor-intensive fashion. This was notoriously the case with &pizza’s best-selling Farmer’s Daughter pie, which required a raw egg cracked on top prior to being put in the oven.
“Listen, I’ve been on the operations side of things,” Burns told PMQ in 2024. “When you ask somebody in ops if something is too difficult to execute consistently, nine times out of 10 they’re going to say that it is. But this was our bestselling pie, our signature item. So we have been telling them for months that it’s going to come back, and we’ve been really focused on how we can do it and do it right.”
By tweaking its dough recipe and sourcing boxes that hold heat longer, &pizza also spent considerable time and resources perfecting its pies for off-premises dining. They’re still using the same five ingredients—with no additives—Burns noted in this week’s PMQ interview, but this was a crucial change due to the way the pizza business evolved during COVID-19. While 70% of the brand’s sales were dine-in before the pandemic, he said, that actually flipped afterwards: Today, &pizza does 70% of its sales through DELCO channels. Most of its in-house orders come via its online ordering platform, while all of its delivery orders go through third-party channels.
Related: Read PMQ Pizza’s DELCO Report
Delivery and carryout, in Burns’s opinion, is where &pizza has a distinct edge over other fast-casual brands like MOD Pizza and Blaze Pizza, which have struggled as they grew to hundreds of locations in a short time span.
“We believe, in its current state, fast-casual pizza is dead,” Burns said. “Our vibe was formulated to have people come inside and enjoy the experience. We had to spend time thinking about how to take that experience and stretch outside our four walls. I think one of the things we do better than anybody is our social media channels. It’s quirky, goofy and topical. We can kind of push the envelope and poke people in the eye where other brands might get in trouble for that.”
It’s worth noting that franchising is a model that’s familiar to Burns. His previous gig was at RAVE Restaurant Group, parent company of Pizza Inn and Pie Five, where he served as executive vice president and chief operating officer.
To put &pizza on the franchising path, Burns said he needed to get the “house in order” and make it a more attractive brand before opening up the franchising spigot. In particular, he wanted to offer franchise partners a largely turnkey operation that could be easily grown in target markets. And, he notes, &pizza’s standard 1,200-square-foot buildout and relative ease of operations—all the brand really offers on its menu is pizza—make it perfectly suited for markets not just up and down the East Coast, but all over the country.
“I believe that everywhere there’s an SEC school, for example, there should be an &pizza,” Burns said. “Our demographic base is 19 to 30 years old, and skews about 50/50 between male and female. It’s a very diverse customer base, which I think is great for us.”
When Michael Lastoria and Steve Salis founded &pizza and opened the first store in Washington D.C. in 2012, they emphasized an edgy, counterculture ethos. Their pizzas were shaped like skateboards. Lastoria officiated at weddings in the shops on Pi Day, and the brand’s biggest sales each year came on April 20 (or 4/20, if that helps you get the reference).
But as the brand grew via company-owned units, some part of its ethos got watered down, Burns said. That’s why he has reinstated provocative employee garb (such as a T-shirt that proclaims “F— Big Pizza”), gotten edgier with &pizza’s messaging, and resurrected the aforementioned Farmer’s Daughter pizza, even giving that daughter a sister (the Farmer’s Other Daughter). He also revived the famous tattoo promotion on National Ampersand Day, in which customers enter a lottery to receive a free ampersand tattoo and free pizza every week for a year.
Now that much of the revamping work is done, Burns is practically busting at the seams to get the word about &pizza’s franchising out there. It’s been a challenging couple of years—one that included some select missteps—but it’s been rewarding, too. And when the first franchisee signs on with &pizza—something Burns expects will happen in the next month or so—that will be a reward unto itself.
“There’s such a cult following here,” Burns said. “Somebody asked me a month ago, ‘Hey, if you knew it was going to take this much work, would you still have [taken the gig as CEO]?’ And I said, ‘I would have run faster.’ I like things that are a bit broken and can be fixed.”
