Pizza Inn Works On Recipe For Comeback
In overhauling its image, Pizza Inn is working the nostalgia card to revitalize the 51-year-old chain, bringing back checkered tabletops and breathing life into its discarded mascot Jo Jo, a dough-flipping, mustachioed cartoon chef.
Not all memories at the chain are happy ones. But the business may have survived one of the restaurant industry’s most turbulent times.
In the past 20 years, Pizza Inn periodically bathed in red ink; lost a swath of stores; sued its founder in a trademark dispute; skated perilously close to liquidation during the 1989 bankruptcy of its second owner, Pantera Corp.; lost in court against ex-CEO Ronnie Parker over a mammoth severance claim; accepted defeat in a legal fracas with Pepsi; and claimed victory in a suit against its former attorneys.
Pizza Inn’s headquarters is in The Colony in Denton County. It was launched in 1958, the same year as Pizza Hut. But it’s had a very different ride in the competitive Italian pie sector.
Pizza Hut, now part of the YUM! Brands stable that includes KFC and Taco Bell, has 6,200 U.S. restaurants and 4,000 abroad. Meanwhile at Pizza Inn, its management distracted by crises or, self-admittedly, not always working in the best interest of its franchise holders, lost more than half its stores in recent decades, down to 310 from a peak of 747 stores in 1979.
“Franchisees didn’t maintain their facilities, and we didn’t focus on how to grow their business,” said Charles Morrison, 41, who joined Pizza Inn as chief financial officer in August 2007, then was tapped as chief executive four months later when his predecessor abruptly resigned.
Instead of keeping franchised restaurants up to standards, a key corporate activity was “policing” them to ensure that they used proprietary products sold by the chain, said Morrison, adding, “We made it very difficult for them to succeed.”
And distrust ran deep-dish thick.
Jim Baenisch, a 45-year Metroplex franchisee, said that in the 1990s, the corporation went so far as to hire a private detective to determine whether he was concealing sales, and therefore paying it smaller royalties.
