Restaurant Development and Design Interviews Oath Pizza Franchisees Drew Kellogg and Stacie Colburn Hayes

In a recent interview with Restaurant Development and Design, Oath Pizza franchisees Drew Kellog and Stacie Colburn Hayes discussed the best practices for developing a national restaurant brand.

Now, Boston-based Oath has eight corporate stores and 21 franchised locations in 17 states. The company’s not ready yet to put a number on how many locations it will open annually, but it plans to be aggressive, especially in the franchise realm. 

The first best practice is to keep it simple. Oath operates a commissary kitchen, where as much food as possible is prepared then shipped to stores. This ensures consistency, brings efficiencies of scale, and means Oath can hire employees with no restaurant experience. “We need them for their personalities,” Kellogg says. This also means the restaurants can open every day with just one staff member on-site, and can close a lot faster, too.

The second best practice is to keep training requirements to a minimum. At Oath, the training only lasts a few days. This means that employees can be working the line quickly. 

The third best practice is to keep the design simple. Build outs for Oath Pizza are much less complicated than traditional units because most food is prepared in the commissary. This allows them to use simple and easy-to-use equipment.

The fourth best practice is to keep community in mind. Oath’s values and mission are tied to the community, Hayes says. “We try to find partnerships with our local communities. We do fundraisers on an ongoing basis. We also do percentages of sales to different nonprofits, different menu items that have a component of donating back to the community as well.”

The fifth and final practice is to leverage partnerships In 2018, Oath Pizza signed up food service contractor Aramark, which has an extensive supply chain and decades of experience in the nontraditional foodservice market. “That’s allowed us to scale quickly,” Kellogg says. “We’re piggy-backing on Aramark’s supply chain, so it’s really been beneficial. Without that relationship it would be very challenging.”

These practices should allow people in the future to quickly build a brand that people can trust and support.

Read the full article here.