Pieology now has 45 units, including 16 that are company owned. | Photo: Shutterstock
The fast-casual pizza chain Pieology closed 17 restaurants leading up to the bankruptcy filing this week. The irony is, the company was trying to save them.
The closures came after an attempt by the Irvine, California-based parent of the brand to save 29 underperforming franchised units. The company acquired the restaurants earlier this year, but (unnamed) investors in the deal pulled out at the last minute.
Ultimately, the parent company didn’t have the capital needed to turn them around, according to court documents filed by founder Carl Chang.
Now Pieology has 45 units, including 16 that are company-owned and another 29 franchised. Those franchised units are not part of the Chapter 11 filing.
That’s less than half of the 103 units the chain had at the end of 2024, which was a 5% decrease from the prior year, and down from 125 in 2019.
Founded in 2011, Pieology was once among the high-flying fast-casual pizza chains growing out of Southern California, where guests walked a makeline to build their personal thin-crust pizzas that were baked in minutes.
The brand attracted celebrity investor/franchisees, including tennis pro Michael Chang (Carl Chang’s brother) and NBA star Kevin Durant. In 2016, the founders of Panda Restaurant Group invested in Pieology, and, later that year, the pizza chain acquired rival Project Pie, another Southern California-based chain.
Project Pie locations were rebranded as Pieology. At the time, Pieology officials pledged to end the year with more than 200 locations.
In 2018, the chain began growing overseas and at one point had 13 international locations. All of the international units, however, have closed.
Like many restaurant chains—and particularly fast-casual pizza brands—it was the pandemic that caused Pieology’s decline, Chang said in court documents.
He blamed the subsequent sales slide on “severe disruption due to the pandemic and subsequent economic environment, including labor shortages, inflationary cost pressure and rapidly shifting consumer behavior.”
The company had invested heavily in developing off-premise and digital channels, including online and mobile ordering, delivery and improving in-store pickup, he said. Those moves required “substantial capital at a time when industry conditions remained volatile.”
Last year, however, there were signs of hope.
Pieology invested in a series of operational improvements at company units, including new kitchen equipment and service tools. The menu and pricing structure was simplified, interiors were refreshed and steps were taken to improve throughput and labor efficiency.
Those efforts brought “measurable improvements,” Chang said.
It gave the company the confidence to then acquire 29 underperforming locations from the largest franchisee in the system, who at the time was past due on payment obligations. That deal, which closed in April, was a non-cash transaction, with past due amounts forgiven. The strategy required an infusion of capital to upgrade equipment, refresh the locations and hire staff.
But shortly before the deal was to close, certain critical investors withdrew funding commitments for reasons unrelated to the company’s performance, Chang said in the filing.
The company had to move forward with the deal anyway to prevent the collapse of the franchisee’s operations, which Chang argued would have severely harmed the overall brand.
Chang said the company tried to find other sources of capital, including private equity, but ultimately was unsuccessful. The company essentially ran out of operating capital and bankruptcy seemed the only option.
With the Chapter 11 filing, Pieology intends to streamline the footprint, focus resources on locations that show promise of becoming sustainably profitable and stabilize operations, he said in the filing.
Pieology’s peers have also shown signs of struggle in the post-COVID economy.
MOD Pizza, once the largest of the assembly line pizza concepts, last year narrowly averted bankruptcy when it was acquired by Elite Restaurant Group. At the time, MOD had 512 units after closing 44 restaurants prior to the deal. But closures have continued, and management expressed doubt about the chain’s ability to continue as a going concern in franchise documents.
Blaze Pizza recently moved its headquarters from Southern California to Atlanta. Last year, Blaze launched a brand overhaul to reignite growth. At the time, Blaze had 330 units.
But Blaze ultimately ended 2024 with 294 domestic units and sales of $387 million—though that marked a less than 3% decline. Now, however, the chain includes about 250 in the U.S. and Canada, with three in the Middle East.
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