Blaze Fast-Fire’d Pizza announced highlights and financial results for its fiscal year ending December 27, 2015 along with its outlook for 2016. The build-your-own pizza chain, known for its chef-driven recipes and casually hip restaurants, also announced that it now has 116 restaurants open with an additional 96 locations secured and planned to open within the next 12 months. In five years, the company expects to be the fifth largest pizza chain in the U.S., directly behind Pizza Hut, Domino’s, Little Caesars, and Papa John’s.

2015 Highlights:

• Opened 55 new restaurants and expanded to 25 states, Washington, D.C. and Canada.Major metropolitan areas now being developed include New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Dallas, Detroit, Miami, and Toronto.
• Achieved average unit volume of $1.37 million for the 50 restaurants open as of December 2014 (trailing 12-months sales as of December 2015).
• Achieved comparable same store sales increase of 7.0 percent.
• Grew system-wide sales to $101 million, an increase of 306 percent compared to $33 million in the prior year. The system-wide sales “run-rate” of the 116 restaurants currently open is forecast at nearly $160 million at the current average unit volumes.
• Grew overall guest satisfaction, including an increase of 0.1 to a system-wide average 4.3 rating on Yelp.
• Signed a multi-year endorsement deal with global icon and NBA All-Star LeBron James.
• Continued our ‘Intelligent Choices’ commitment by changing to a plant-based straw so that all packaging is now 100 percent eco-friendly (recyclable, compostable, or made from post-consumer content).
• Celebrated being named the fastest growing private company in Los Angeles by the Los Angeles Business Journal.

2016 Outlook:

• The opening of 96 new restaurants during the next 12 months, including expansion into ten new states and the major metropolitan areas of Boston, Denver, Salt Lake City, Phoenix, and Atlanta.
• Introducing a new mobile app that supports online ordering, loyalty, mobile pay, and social connectivity—all designed to strengthen guest attachment and increase daily guest transactions.
• Continuing our ‘Intelligent Choices’ commitment by announcing that every pizza and salad ingredient is now free of artificial colors, flavors, preservatives, and fillers.
• Opening our new 5,000 square foot flagship restaurant at Walt Disney World in Florida.

“We delivered strong performance in 2015 by successfully executing on our growth strategy,” says Jim Mizes, president and COO of Blaze Pizza. “This included improving our guest metrics while simultaneously growing our restaurant count by 110 percent with 55 net new store openings. We also posted our third consecutive year of positive same store sales with a 7 percent increase.”