Papa Johns names interim CFO as pizza competition stays tight

Papa Johns International, Inc. named Chris Collins interim chief financial officer after Ravi Thanawala’s exit, and Thanawala will stay available in an advisory role until July 31, 2026. Collins joined the company in April 2021 and previously served as interim CFO from March 2023 to July 2023, giving Papa Johns a familiar finance hand just as the pizza business keeps fighting for traffic and margin.

The change comes after a bruising first quarter. Papa Johns said total revenue fell 7.7% year over year to $478.6 million, North America comparable sales dropped 6.4%, global system-wide restaurant sales slipped 3% to $1.20 billion, and net income was $7 million with adjusted EBITDA of $48 million. CEO Todd Penegor said the chain was navigating a “cautious consumer environment and promotional QSR marketplace” and would lean into value options, innovation and digital ordering.

For store teams, that kind of pressure usually shows up far from Louisville finance offices: tighter labor controls, sharper menu engineering, more scrutiny of overtime and throughput, and fewer promotions that fail to move volume without hurting margins. In pizza, where ingredient costs, delivery economics and discounting can all press at once, a finance shift often ripples into how aggressively a brand uses staffing, how it prices bundles, and which deals survive the next planning cycle.

Pizza Hut is facing the same hard math inside Yum! Brands. Yum opened a formal review of strategic options for Pizza Hut on Nov. 4, 2025, hired Goldman Sachs and Barclays as advisers, and later said the brand would close about 250 underperforming U.S. stores in the first half of 2026 as part of its Hut Forward program. Yum said the review had cost $36 million in 2025, and Pizza Hut’s worldwide store count fell from 20,225 at the end of 2024 to 19,974 at the end of 2025.

At the same time, Pizza Hut has been pushing fresh offers to defend traffic. The chain relaunched Hut Rewards on April 21, 2026, rolled out Hut Crust on March 11, 2026, introduced Crispy Parm Pan Pizza on May 27, 2026, and announced its Summer of Hut Originals campaign on June 9, 2026. Yum later signed definitive agreements to sell Pizza Hut for $2.7 billion to LongRange Capital for Pizza Hut ex-China and to Yum China for Pizza Hut China, a clean sign that the chain’s next chapter will be shaped as much by finance as by food.