By Charlie Pogacar

Mike Burns, the new CEO of &pizza, wants you to know that the brand is doing things differently. But for the 50-location chain, based in Washington D.C., that means getting back to what it used to do well. 

Founded by Michael Lastoria in 2012, &pizza earned a reputation for being a “counterculture brand,” as Burns puts it, one that let employees be themselves and serve “kickass pizza.” Sometime in the past five years, Burns asserted, the brand “lost its way.” 

This is intel Burns ascertained via conversations with Lastoria, as well as extensive on-the-ground research. In fact, one of the first things that Burns did when he was named CEO was fly to New York City, hop in a car, and drive down the East Coast visiting about 30 &pizza locations.

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“It’s a brand that obviously had massive legs for a while,” Burns said. “But when I started here and went behind the curtain to look at what stores were like now, my eyes were telling me that it was not the same brand any more.” 

Burns came away from those experiences believing there was plenty of low-hanging fruit. For example, team members used to wear company T-shirts sporting a huge ampersand logo. Over the years, those t-shirts had been dumbed down, with a small, 1×1 logo on the chest. The shirts are back to the large symbol, with an inlay of text that reads “F— Big Pizza.” Burns wanted team members to feel proud to be a part of the brand—to, almost literally, wear it on their sleeves.

Similarly, employees used to have their choice of a flat-bill company hat or a beanie, but that had become a standard-issue baseball hat employees were expected to wear forwards. “I don’t care if they wear their hat forward, sideways or upside down,” Burns said. “It doesn’t matter! I just want you to be friendly and engage with the customer and serve them good food.” 

Prior to being named CEO of &pizza, Burns served as COO for RAVE Restaurant Group, parent company of Pizza Inn and Pie Five Pizza. Burns will tell you: It’s hard to imagine two pizza brands on further ends of the spectrum than &pizza and Pizza Inn. “I think the only commonality,” he said, “is that they both sell pizza. Other than that, they require different footprints, the customer base is different, the pizza is different, the business model is different.” 

But Burns will also tell you that the brands share one very important thing in common: Each has a distinct customer base to message to. Just as Pizza Inn successfully engaged its rural, Southern customer base, Burns believes &pizza has to get back to connecting with its urban, more liberal customers. 

The good news for &pizza is that Burns and his executive team seem to excel on the messaging side of things. One recent example of &pizza’s new marketing energy was in response to unearthed 2021 comments about “childless cat ladies” from J.D. Vance, the Republican party’s nominee for vice president. &pizza quickly launched a promotion via social media offering customers a free cat toy with any purchase. 

The pointed messaging extends to recruiting efforts as well. In a recent interview with Cheddar, Burns offered up a memorable one-liner when speaking about the culture &pizza wants to foster in its storefronts: “if Chick-fil-A would hire you, then we don’t want you.” &pizza plans to lean into this idea: The brand recently purchased the domain name “Chickfilawonthireyou.com” to recruit new team members (the website is still under construction).

“We were a cool restaurant brand,” Burns said. “From a social media standpoint, we interacted with customers. Inside the stores, the music was loud, employees could be themselves. That’s what we’re getting back to.” 

On the operations side of things, Burns has already begun making massive overhauls. For one thing, he outsourced IT to third parties. The brand now uses Toast, Olo, and Thanx— “They all work great, they all talk to each other,” Burns said—instead of a complex web of first-party platforms that required a relatively large IT team. 

Burns also noticed that district managers were responsible for up to 30 stores. As somebody who once, with help from district managers, oversaw hundreds of stores for Bojangles, he recognized this as a real problem. The fix for this was rather simple: He right-sized the number of &pizza district managers to ensure nobody had more than five to seven stores at once. 

“You can’t manage 30 restaurants effectively, you just can’t,” Burns said. “Somebody’s always out of product. Somebody’s calling in sick. Somebody got robbed. The power stopped working. There’s a water leak. You can’t manage that when you’ve got 30 stores, but you can manage it when you’re just responsible for seven of them.” 

Any story about &pizza would be incomplete without mention of its menu. The brand’s iconic skateboard-shaped pies are core to its identity. Upon taking over, Burns took one look at the menu and saw an immediate problem: Every single pizza was the same price. “There was no value play,” Burns noted, a particular issue during uncertain economic times. Pies now range from $9.99 to $13.99. The brand has leaned into brash names that have always made its menu idiosyncratic: Recent LTOs include the Glizzy McGuire (featuring hot dogs, amongst other items), the Dickle and the Sun’s Out, Buns Out. 

Burns also conducted a deep dive into why &pizza removed its all-time bestselling pie, the Farmer’s Daughter, from the menu. What he found was that the pie was a bit tricky from an operational perspective, as it required a team member to crack a raw egg on top of the pizza before it went into the oven. 

“Listen, I’ve been on the operations side of things,” Burns said. “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.” 

A lot of the above has been happening behind the scenes at &pizza for months now. According to Burns, it’s all ramping up to a big exclamation point: On Sunday, September 8, the brand will host Ampersand Day. It’s a celebration of the symbol at the core of &pizza’s name, which has always represented the brand’s connection to the neighborhood surrounding it, specifically symbolizing unity and togetherness. 

In honor of Ampersand Day, &pizza will begin offering team members the opportunity to receive a free tattoo of the ampersand symbol. It’s yet another example of something &pizza once did that, for one reason or another, went away. Burns and other senior executives have already gotten the ampersand tattooed somewhere on their body—Burns elected to get his left forearm inked. 

“If I’m gonna stand up in front of a group of people and say, hey, I believe in this brand, I mean, there’s no better way to do that than get a permanent brand on my arm, right?” Burns said. “But it’s also a way to tell the team, like, I’m gonna ask you guys to do a lot of things. Some of these things are gonna be hard. You’re going to have to decide if you want to work here or not, and if you don’t, that’s OK. But I am all in. So come on this journey with me and we’ll make something special happen.”