Pizza Hut U.S. is looking for a president following the departure of David Graves after four-plus years. Aaron Powell, the chain’s global CEO, will directly oversee Pizza Hut U.S. as part of his duties as the company searches “for the right candidate to backfill the role,” a Pizza Hut U.S. spokesperson said in an email.
“We appreciate the strong leadership David Graves has brought to the Pizza Hut U.S. business during the last four-plus years, and the positive impact he had made in helping modernize the brand and positioning it for the future,” the spokesperson said. “We wish him well on this next chapter.”
The U.S. division of Pizza Hut, which accounts for 6,593 of the brand’s 19,866 restaurants (year-end 2023), reported same-store sales declines of 4 percent in Q4. The number grew 1 percent for the full year.
Pizza Hut U.S. reported 219 closures in 2023 and 253 gross builds. Pizza Hut Global reported 1,586 gross builds and 752 closures.
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Some of the softness belongs to a difficult comp as Pizza Hut launched Melts and promoted Detroit-style pizza in the prior year. Management cautioned the same could be true of Q1 2024, a period that’s set to measure against an 8 percent increase last year that reflected a full period of sales from the Melts platform and the Big New Yorker. However, Yum! CEO David Gibbs said he expected performance trends on a two-year basis to improve as mutliple LTOs were on deck, including Hot Honey Pizza and wings.
Graves joined Pizza Hut as chief brand officer in 2020 from KFC, where he served as director of marketing strategy and innovation (he was a Procter & Gamble vet before Yum!) Alongside Kevin Hochman (also from KFC, now CEO at Brinker International), he helped lead Pizza Hut on a turnaround journey that involved refreshing the legacy concept’s asset base toward delco units and reinvigorating its innovation and marketing calendar.
At that point, domestic same-store sales had declined 4 percent and Yum! cautioned investors Pizza Hut’s U.S. fleet could drop as low as 7,000 locations, which amounted to roughly 500 closures in a 24-month window. Globally, the brand shuttered 1,745 restaurants in 2020 (it also opened 682) to end the fiscal year with 17,639 venues around the world—the lowest figure since Q3 2018.
The main reason Pizza Hut slid was to accelerate a stateside transition to an off-premises-focused base. In October 2018, the gap between dine-in sales and sales from delivery and carryout was significant, with both the U.S. and international seeing a roughly 10-point differential. About half of Pizza Hut’s sales flowed from dine-in. Within three to four years, the company expected that to drop to 25 percent. And in the U.S., the conversion was even more pronounced, as dine-in sales declined to less than 10 percent of total take.
In Q3 2021, Pizza Hut’s U.S. division posted 2 percent same-store sales growth, which was 8 percent higher on a two-year stack. And Pizza Hut’s off-premises channel was up 17 percent.
Hochman first entered his role as Pizza Hut’s interim U.S. president. Graves succeeded him on January 1, 2022. Powell, a Kimberly-Clark vet, came onboard in September 2021 to fill a spot vacated by now-Topgolf CEO Artie Starrs.
The brand had its share of successful COVID pivots—it fulfilled north of 50 million contactless orders via delivery and carryout by the end of that March. It also launched the “Hut Lane,” which is essentially a pickup lane attached to stores, as well as get involved with aggregators. From a brand marketing side, the “Pizza Lover’s Pizza” campaign infused nostalgia into the chain’s approach again, from Pac-Man augmented reality games to tapping Craig Robinson, best known for his role as Darryl Philbin in “The Office,” in a “Newstalgia” push.
