How Your Pie Rebuilt Its Business for a New Era of Fast-Casual Pizza

How Your Pie Rebuilt Its Business for a New Era of Fast-Casual Pizza

Ben Coley

Mon, August 17, 2026 at 8:05 PM GMT+3 6 min read

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Your Pie emerged from the pandemic with a different business than the one it had built before 2020.

For example, off-premises orders once accounted for roughly 10 percent of sales at the fast-casual pizza chain. Today, that figure sits near 40 percent and has climbed as high as 45 percent in recent weeks. For CEO Ken Caldwell, the shift required more than adding digital ordering and accommodating delivery drivers. Your Pie had to reconsider nearly every piece of its restaurant model without sacrificing the hospitality that had long distinguished the brand.

This was the mindset as the brand navigated an 18-month period of refinement.

The response touched technology, equipment, menu development, restaurant size, catering, corporate stores, and franchise expansion.

The roughly 60-unit Your Pie installed a new point-of-sale system and loyalty app and added Tattle for guest feedback. Its integrated technology stack connects Toast, Tattle, and Thanx, giving operators a clearer view of restaurant performance and customer behavior.

The objective is also simplicity. Digital ordering and off-premises occasions added complexity to a model originally built around customers moving through a pizza line and dining inside the restaurant.

"One of the things that I have been trying to solve for a long time is to reduce the friction, not only in the guest experience but also in our operating model. Where we used to just be able to make pizza, it's a lot more than that now and so in order to hire and retain good people, we have to reduce the friction in the operating model."

Data from those systems gives Your Pie insight into inventory, food costs, scheduling, customer frequency, and other key metrics. Guest feedback can identify shortcomings in individual stores and give the company information it can use for training.

Physical operations are changing, too. Your Pie adopted a self-rotating version of its brick oven during the past year, reducing the expertise required to operate the equipment. The menu has expanded with wings, additional wing flavors, and Pizza Shop Sandwiches, giving restaurants products suited to more occasions.

The changing sales mix also created an opportunity to shrink the traditional Your Pie restaurant.

Previous stores typically occupied 2,500 to 2,800 square feet. The chain can now operate its primary model in roughly 2,000 to 2,200 square feet because fewer customers need seats. The reduction lowers development costs and improves the economics for franchisees.

Caldwell has no interest in pushing that logic so far that Your Pie becomes an off-premises-only concept.

"There could have been a real tendency for us to go to 1,200 square feet, everything takeout, double drive-thru—all the things that everybody thinks about. And we're resisting that. What we are really good at is providing a best-in-class product in our local communities with an unapologetic great guest experience."

The transformation wasn't achieved without some failures along the way.

Caldwell, who has served as CEO for nearly three years, initially viewed nontraditional development as a significant source of expansion. Your Pie tested a roughly 250-square-foot "Your Pie on the Fly" format inside an arena and a university student facility.

Neither worked.

The concept could serve pizza quickly from a compact footprint, but Caldwell concluded that the product produced in those venues did not match what customers received inside traditional Your Pie restaurants. The model also stripped away interaction with local operators and employees.

"At the time, I saw it as an unbelievable opportunity for us, but I was wrong," the CEO says.

That lesson has pushed Your Pie back toward traditional restaurants and local franchise ownership, particularly in smaller communities where operators can develop close ties with customers.

The company is taking a different stance on corporate development. One of Caldwell's first priorities as CEO was opening company-owned restaurants, giving the franchisor capital in the system alongside its operators. Corporate locations also give Your Pie a place to test ideas before asking franchisees to invest.

"I don't ever want to risk franchisees' capital in a test situation," Caldwell says. "We need to be in the game. We need to be able to do things that may work out for the brand and may not."

Catering represents another source of potential sales. Historically, individual franchisees pursued the business independently if they saw an opportunity in their markets. Your Pie has since integrated Olo Catering with ezCater, creating infrastructure franchisees can use to pursue large orders.

"From an ops perspective and from a growth perspective, it is a lot easier to serve one customer with 100 pizzas than 100 customers with 100 pizzas."

Geographically, Your Pie is concentrating much of its development in the Southeast, where the Athens, Georgia-founded chain already has recognition and density. In fact, more than 50 percent of the footprint is in the Peach State. The brand operates restaurants elsewhere, including Colorado, California, and Montana, but Caldwell sees an advantage in expanding outward from existing markets.

Secondary and tertiary communities have proven particularly productive. Caldwell once expected dense urban markets such as Atlanta's Buckhead neighborhood, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, and New York City to provide major opportunities. Experience pointed the company elsewhere.

Your Pie has found that franchisees in smaller markets can become part of their communities in ways that support the chain's hospitality-driven identity. Caldwell sees an operator's ability to hire and retain strong employees and connect locally as crucial pieces of accelerating sales.

That focus comes after a difficult period for fast-casual pizza as a category. Pie Five, which once had 100 locations, now has fewer than 15 stores. Meanwhile, Pieology declared bankruptcy, Blaze Pizza recently hired a new CEO, and MOD Pizza was sold after reports of possible bankruptcy.

The segment's growth during the 2010s brought a wave of brands competing through customization and assembly-line service. The novelty attracted customers, but Caldwell believes operators lost sight of what customers actually wanted.

Your Pie's answer is not to abandon its roots. It is updating how customers access the brand so that delivery, takeout, catering, digital ordering, and dine-in visits produce a consistent experience.

That makes the company's recent work less a reinvention of Your Pie than an effort to preserve what worked as consumer habits changed around it.

"What we're trying to do is eliminate that friction not only between guests and restaurant, but within the restaurant. I go back to the guest experience. The hospitality we can provide is then ultimately frictionless. The product speaks for itself. We've got the best there is, but what we want to do is make it easy for the customer—frictionless experience—and make that experience memorable so that they'll come back."

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