PizzaExpress - comment

Better late than never. Not relevant to the bonds in the short term, but following a family (due diligence) visit to Britain’s favourite pizza chain, one thought befell all of us: They need protein. The world has moved on from the 90s, and people want chicken (10-year trend at least). The purchase of the European license for Houston Hot Chicken (PE are now looking for 30 sites across the continent and are planning to open 50 sites in the UK over the next three years) represents that move, but not how we imagined it. Rather than reinvent the big pizza chain with chicken, the strategy looks rather like managing its inevitable decline. Faith- (or fear-) fully preserving PizzaExpress brand strategy is a creditor-friendly, low-risk/low-return strategy, and at the scale of the company, we don’t understand the reason for importing and paying license fees to a US chicken brand instead of just inventing one from scratch. The 160k IG followers should only be a matter of months.