By Rick Hynum
As Papa Johns contends with declining sales, store closures and ever-nagging rumors about a possible buyout, it’s shaking up its menu significantly, looking for a competitive edge over surging rivals like Domino’s and Marco’s.
Papa Johns has now jumped into a whole new category with the launch of its Oven-Toasted Sandwiches this week. At the same time, it’s bidding farewell to other longtime menu items that were once hailed as game changers but proved to be more trouble than they were worth.
The chain said the new sandwich offering “continues its evolution beyond pizza” and “marks a defining step, introducing sandwiches that don’t just compete in the category, but aim to redefine it with bigger flavor, higher-quality ingredients and a more indulgent experience.”
From a menu perspective, Papa Johns has been one of the more adventurous pizza giants in recent years, introducing items like the Calzone Papa Bites in 2024 and launching a flatbread-style sandwich called the Papadia in 2020. The latter was inspired by the piadina, a flatbread sandwich from Northern Italy. In fact, Papa Johns hailed its Doritos Cool Ranch Papadia as its “biggest innovation ever” in May 2023.
Soon, those much-ballyhooed items will be gone—they’re scheduled to be cut from Papa Johns’ menu in the second quarter of 2026 as the brand looks to reduce menu complexity and improve productivity on the make line.
“We talked about pulling some of our rhythm breakers off the menu to really drive a focus on being not just the best pizza makers in the business, but over time being the best bakers,” Papa Johns CFO Ravi Thanawala said in an investors call earlier this year. “And the elimination of Papadias and Papa Bites will have an impact on our business, but it’s absolutely the right thing to do from an ops complexity [perspective].”
Enter the Oven-Toasted Sandwiches and cue the fanfare-blasting trumpets.
“This launch is more than a new menu item—it’s a statement about where our brand is headed,” said Shivram Vaideeswaran, Papa Johns’ senior vice president of brand marketing. “We’re taking the flavor and quality leadership we’ve built in pizza and pushing it further.” The new sandwiches, he added, “are our next step in bringing bold innovation and high-quality ingredients to everything we do.”
Built on toasted ciabatta-style bread and layered with meats, melty white American cheese and all-new signature sauces, each sandwich is brushed with the brand’s Special Garlic Sauce and finished with either a tangy pizza ranch or rich garlic truffle sauce. The lineup includes:
- Philly Cheesesteak: Seasoned steak, roasted onions and peppers, pizza ranch and white American cheese.
- Chicken Bacon Ranch: All white meat grilled chicken, bacon, diced tomatoes, banana peppers, pizza ranch and white American cheese.
- Steak & Mushroom: Seasoned steak with roasted mushrooms and onion, garlic truffle sauce and white American cheese.
They’ll sell for $7.99 or customers can pair two or more for $6.99 each through the Papa Pairings offer. But there will soon be fewer Papa Johns stores offering them. In late February the company announced it will close 300 stores in North America—200 this year and 100 in 2027.
Rick Hynum is PMQ’s editor in chief.
