PHOENIX — Phoenix-based Peter Piper Pizza is set for a nationwide expansion with newly designed, more nutrition-aware restaurants.
The new Peter Piper Pizza will have less emphasis on the games and more focus on food, Chief Marketing Officer Jason Greenwood said. The redesign has been in the works since 2013, when the logo and color schemes were updated. Now the restaurants will be redesigned.
“We realized the family was changing but still has a great need for Peter Piper,” he said.
The company’s existing locations will be redesigned to match the new style, he said. About half will be rebranded this year.
Greenwood estimated it would cost franchise owners between $300,000 to $700,000 to redesign each of their properties, but later said those estimates were out of date and the changes would simply be “six-figure” projects. He said franchise agreements call for a certain amount of reinvestment in the properties and the redesigns fall within that operating agreement.
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The newest version of the restaurants still will include games, but also partitions from the games, offering a quieter dining area. They also will have more viewing windows into the kitchens to show off the handmade quality of the food, Greenwood said.
“The assumption is that if you have a game room you are not serious about food,” he said. “But actually there are lots of handmade processes in our pizza. Food is our differentiator at Peter Piper.”
Owner CEC Entertainment hired a popular Scottsdale chef, Gregory Casale, in 2011. He serves now as senior director of culinary development for both Peter Piper and Chuck E. Cheese brands, and works in Dallas.
The company expects to open five new company-owned restaurants by year end, with another four planned for early 2017, along with several other markets in development and new franchises in Texas.
Peter Piper now has 140 restaurants in Phoenix, Tucson, Texas and Mexico. Thirty-two are corporate owned and the rest are franchises. The expansion is likely to bring the brand to new markets in the Southeast and Southwest, he said.
Expansion was the business plan in 2014 when CEC Entertainment Inc. announced it had acquired Peter Piper, which ranked at the time as the 15th largest U.S. pizza chain. CEC also owns the Chuck E. Cheese brand, which has about 580 locations.
“We are about to go through the biggest period of expansion this brand has seen,” Greenwood said. “CEC wants to make this a national brand.”