New Pizza Hut under construction on Austin Peay Highway in Memphis

A new Pizza Hut was taking shape behind Tropical Smoothie Cafe at 3555 Austin Peay Highway, and the small footprint said a lot about where the brand is betting on growth in Memphis. The store, listed as coming soon, sat near the Austin Peay Highway and Yale Road intersection and was being built as a delivery-and-carryout unit, not a full dine-in restaurant.

The permit filed with the Memphis and Shelby County Division of Planning and Development put the project at about 1,695 square feet, a size that points to a tighter operation than the older Pizza Hut units many workers still picture. A store that small usually means fewer front-of-house tasks, more emphasis on the make line and online tickets, and faster handoffs at the counter or the door. For drivers, cooks and shift managers, that usually shifts the daily rhythm toward order timing, dispatch coordination, packaging and turnaround speed.

Memphis already had a sizable Pizza Hut footprint, and the city locator listed multiple delivery-and-carryout stores and Pizza Hut Express locations, including the coming-soon Austin Peay shop. That makes the new build look less like a one-off and more like a network-density play, with Pizza Hut trying to tighten coverage in a corridor where delivery times and territory boundaries matter. In a market where DoorDash and Uber Eats keep pressuring restaurant delivery business, another company-owned or franchised route can mean more volume, but also more pressure to keep the runs flowing and the food hot.

The Memphis project also fit into Pizza Hut’s wider reset. Yum! Brands said Pizza Hut U.S., Taco Bell U.S. and KFC U.S. all operated on the Byte digital ordering platform, and that more than half of system sales came through digital channels in 2024. Yum! also said it generated more than $30 billion in digital sales that year. That digital shift has been part of Pizza Hut’s overhaul since 2019, when the chain started a $130 million modernization effort aimed at smaller delivery-and-carryout restaurants instead of the old Red Roof dine-in model.

That broader strategy has not been all expansion. Yum! opened a formal review of strategic options for Pizza Hut in late 2025, and Restaurant Business Online reported plans to close 250 U.S. Pizza Hut restaurants in the first half of 2026. Against that backdrop, the Austin Peay build stood out as a clear signal that Pizza Hut still sees room to invest where the delivery math works, and where a smaller store can help defend territory one order at a time.