Oath Pizza was born in tiny Nantucket, Massachusetts, bringing pizza to locals and tourists alike. The company has since expanded to 29 units, with 21 franchised and eight corporate-owned stores.

Franchising began in 2017 with a relationship with Aramark, bringing the brand across the country to universities including Arizona State University and Sam Houston State University in Texas, as well as corporate dining facilities and hospitals.

CEO Drew Kellogg and Chief Marketing Officer Stacie Colburn Hayes, both former Chipotle execs, have brought the lessons they learned from the fast casual leader to help Oath Pizza expand nationwide.

Pizza Marketplace talked to Kellogg and Hayes by phone to learn more about what Oath has to offer and how it has grown despite the COVID-19 pandemic.

Q. Where are you concentrating the brand going forward?

Kellogg: Our eight corporate restaurants are spread between Washington D.C. and Boston. Our corporate expansion will be on that footprint as we've got operational support and strength in those positions. Our franchise interest has been very strong on both coasts, as far west as California, and that's particularly interesting. We've had a number of interesting inquiries on the Eastern seaboard, South Carolina, Florida, Texas and Georgia.

Q. What are you looking for in a franchisee?

Kellogg: First and foremost, people who are passionate and optimistic. Somebody who loves pizza. Oath is a unique brand and a unique franchise opportunity because it's a very simple operation. We can go into locations other franchises cannot. We have a very small footprint requirement. Our back-of-the-house operations don't require gas, which is black iron infrastructure, or hooded exhaust, and so we can be built for much less investment costs than other franchise opportunities. Everybody loves pizza, and so we want to be a community-oriented brand that is focused on people development and growth opportunities.

Q. What lessons did you bring from Chipotle that you're using at Oath Pizza?

Kellogg: Stacie and I were refined in Chipotle's experience. We were both there for about a decade, so we come with a lot of operational expertise and appreciation for very high-quality food, and we brought that mindset to Oath to replicate what we deployed so well at Chipotle — really around operational simplicity and efficiency. Stacie was an expert in both local store marketing and national marketing deployment and ran the teams nationwide for the roll out of many, many programs for Chipotle as well as the digital marketing infrastructure that she developed there and brought over.

On the operational side, the people development and cultural aspects that we held so dear at Chipotle and grew with success we look to replicate at Oath. Our teams are small, they're efficient, they're internally developed and that gives us a very consistent experience in the hospitality side for the consumer.

Hayes: I think the biggest thing that I brought over was that commitment to giving our consumers a better option and higher quality ingredients, focusing on how we make their lives better through our messaging and giving them custom options. And then the digital infrastructure that we put in place was really driving by knowing the importance of being able to grow our own database and really give offers and messaging that's really specific to what our customers need and want and personalizing the experience for them. So, a lot of what we put into place digitally was that as well as creating a seamless front-of-house and back-of-house experience for our team and our customers that can also be replicated for our franchisees.

Q: How has the pandemic challenged your growth?

Kellogg: We're growing very well against our 2019 performance. I would say that the restaurant performance that we've got in place has continued to progress. It hasn't stopped our growth. It may have slowed our growth a little bit coming out of it. But most importantly is that we're looking forward with optimism because we're managing through the remainder of the pandemic and a lot of folks are looking for new opportunities. The system refinement, ease of operations and the ability to bring a resilient category to people ­­— pizza has done very well through the pandemic and there's a lot of demand for diversifying workforce and risk and meeting people where they are as they rotate out of city centers to suburban environments. We're at the front edge of that in many markets with a product and capability … I don't know of another franchise that can do what we can do.

Q: What sets Oath apart from its competitors?

Kellogg: As a category … we don't handle the dough production or process in the restaurant. We have a commissary that hand stretches and sears our dough in avocado oil. It's a process that allows the dough to come into the restaurant and take out all of that proofing and waste as well as space requirements. Making pizza dough takes time, it takes a lot of manipulation. It takes temperature and humidity control. We put all of that in one central location and get all of the efficiency of doing it to scale. When you do that, you take a lot of the space requirements and labor requirements out of the restaurant, so we can operate much more efficiently than other franchise pizza operators and … compared to our days at Chipotle, a fraction of the labor requirement that we did there.

Q: Tell us a little about the digital infrastructure you've built to meet customer demands.

Hayes: When we first came on board, digital was really important to us knowing that it would be an important part of our business in five years. The pandemic really pushed that up a bit for us. We were lucky enough to put many foundational things in place that helped us tremendously when COVID hit and into the future, but we first worked on making sure that we could create those systems that were as efficient and seamless as possible in the front of house and back of house. We put our app and our online ordering in place and we were the beta tester for our app and our online ordering systems, so we were able to create a custom app and online system that are used by many restaurant clients now. We put direct delivery in place on our app and online ordering platform so we can collect that data from our customers and really market to them and give them that personalized experience. We also integrated all of our systems through Checkmate, the third-party delivery platform as well as our POS, our app and our online ordering platform so that we could more easily make updates to our menu and it wouldn't have to be such a manual process. Everything that we put in place was really meant to also make sure that anything that we did would be easily implemented by franchisees as well.

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