Pedestrians pass by a Boston Pizza restaurant on Yonge Street in Toronto, June 6, 2023.Ammar Bowaihl/The Globe and Mail
If you grew up with a Boston Pizza BPF-UN-T in your town—which, given its 60-year tenure in Canada, you probably did — you might remember its distinctive roof and familiar menu of pizzas and pastas. For most of its history, the casual dining chain followed a reliable blueprint for its locations — a sprawling, 6,400 square foot standalone restaurant, purpose-built from the ground up and complete with a large dining room and sports bar. But in an attempt to expand into underserved markets amid rising construction costs, the chain has reevaluated its longtime building strategy. It turns out that even a time-honoured classic has to move with the times.
Over the past six years, Boston Pizza has made two major adjustments to the way it builds restaurants. First, it’s shifted towards a 25% smaller footprint that reduces non-revenue-generating space while maintaining the seat count at around 240. There’s still plenty of room for its four major revenue streams—the dining room, sports bar, three-season patio, and takeout and delivery—but with the perk of significant savings in capital and operating expenses. “Reducing the space not only means that it costs us less to build, but costs less in rent on an ongoing basis,” says Boston Pizza president Jordan Holm. “It’s more efficient for us and the franchisee.”
But in a more radical shift for a brand that made its name on purpose-built spaces with a cookie-cutter formula, Boston Pizza is now experimenting with retrofitting existing restaurants. “We used to really value being the first brand to exist in a physical structure, since it gives us so much more control,” says Holm. But creating from scratch isn’t realistic in every market. “It’s time to show that the brand can adapt and be successful in different physical representations.” Sure, the new approach involves a little more head-scratching than building from the ground up, but it also opens new avenues for growth in areas that were previously out of reach. The first retrofit opened in January at Four Points Sheraton in Vaughan, Ontario, and another is under construction in Renfrew.
For a business that rests on nostalgia and familiarity, change can be a risky proposition. Move too quickly and you’ll alienate your customers; stand too still and risk being left behind the times. But Holm maintains that as even the brand retains its core appeal, adaptability is a key part of Boston Pizza’s strategy. Besides the smaller new builds and retrofits, Boston Pizza has thoroughly embraced the digital revolution, from guest-facing tech to efficiency-minded software on the operations side. Its core menu naturally centres pizza and pasta, but five feature menus a year offer the leeway to incorporate trends and regional preferences. Flexible scheduling for its largely young workforce helps keep the talent happy, as does ample opportunity to advance from within—Holm himself started as a dishwasher and delivery driver.
“We’ve reached an age and a scale that requires us and our franchisees to think of new ways of appealing to guests, and to evolve our design,” he says. “We aim to weave adaptability through everything we do.”
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