MenuMasters 2013: Papa John's Pizza

Simply combining two existing menu items to create a new dish may not sound like the most groundbreaking development strategy, but as executives at Papa John’s International Inc. know, the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts.

That was the case with Papa John’s Pizza’s Buffalo Chicken Pizza — a marriage of the chain’s signature pizza and popular Buffalo-wing appetizer — which proved to be one of its most popular limited-time offerings ever during the six weeks it was available in March and April 2012.

It was so popular, in fact, that the Louisville, Ky.-based chain brought it back last September and has plans to give it another encore this May.

Using the toppings already at its disposal — chicken strips, creamy ranch sauce, bacon, onions and Buffalo dipping sauce — Papa John’s created a new item that fit its philosophy of precisely and efficiently executing a familiar culinary concept, said Sean Muldoon, the chain’s senior vice president of research and development, quality assurance, and supply chain.

“[Founder John Schnatter] built the company on keeping operations fairly simple,” Muldoon said. “Our footprints aren’t that big, the oven platform is straightforward, and we try not to have hundreds of SKUs. We try to be innovative like this when we’re doing new product offerings, though sometimes we’ll bring in three or four new items for an LTO.”

A large Buffalo Chicken Pizza was priced at $10 in the chain’s more than 3,200 domestic restaurants.

Dennis Lombardi, executive vice president of Dublin, Ohio-based WD Partners, praised the Buffalo Chicken Pizza’s ability to give customers a “safe but intriguing new option.”
 
“I know what pizza is, I know what Buffalo chicken is, and I think they go together, so I’ll try it,” Lombardi said. “It works in the minds of those who have yet to try it. You can get Buffalo chicken pizza at California Pizza Kitchen or some independents, but it’s still unique and understandable.”

Additionally, the product seemed relatively novel, as it did not yet have wide exposure from the top pizza chains. Though Domino’s Pizza’s American Legends line of regionally inspired pies does include a Buffalo chicken item, pizzas featuring that flavor profile had not been the primary focus of advertising campaigns by the major pizza chains.

The pizza generated more trial and repeat orders than usual, said Muldoon, adding that the Buffalo Chicken Pizza accounted for about double the average sales mix of a typical LTO.

Performance strong as LTO, permanent item

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Operators in the Northeast, where Buffalo wings were created and popularized, drove the demand within Papa John’s franchise community, Muldoon said. Those franchisees are among those that have kept the Buffalo Chicken Pizza on their menus permanently, even though nationally the brand has cycled the item in just during peak sports seasons, like March for college basketball and August and September for professional and college football.

“We had requests from franchisees in the Northeast around developing a pizza with Buffalo chicken, and from those requests our R&D kitchens here started building all sorts of iterations around it,” Muldoon said. “As we started to take those through the pipeline, a lot of our people showed lots of interest.”

Building on the domestic success of the product, Papa John’s this year is taking the Buffalo Chicken Pizza around the world as its first international LTO, beginning in March in the United Kingdom and Europe. Introductions are slated for the Middle East in the second quarter and Asia in the second half of 2013.

“It might not be right for all 35 countries, but, where we can, we like to take the best ideas [to] other parts of the system,” Muldoon said.

Because Papa John’s is self-distributed, he added, the rollout did not take very long — the only new ingredient consideration was new packaging for the chain’s ranch sauce. Very little incremental training was required, Muldoon said.

He added that the Buffalo Chicken Pizza’s food cost was well within what Papa John’s targets for LTOs, although he noted that “the bacon made [the food cost] not a lot less than a typical LTO because demand is so high for bacon and people love it.”

The brand also created another new product from the cuts of chicken, Chicken Poppers, and added the item to the menu in the winter of 2012, culinary innovation specialist Melissa Ritchie said.

“It’s about utilizing our ingredients in a different way,” she said.

Though Muldoon said Papa John’s plans to deploy the Buffalo Chicken Pizza strategically as an LTO, the few franchisees in the Northeast and Northwest that offer the Buffalo Chicken Pizza year-round report that it is performing well as a permanent fixture, too.

“There’s momentum in some parts of the system to make [Buffalo Chicken Pizza] permanent,” he said. “The folks from the Northeast and Northwest are telling me that the item is mixing higher now that it’s permanent for them than the national average when we had it as an LTO.”

Contact Mark Brandau at [email protected].
Follow him on Twitter: @Mark_from_NRN