Papa Johns is updating its logo for the first time in more than a decade—including dropping its apostrophe—as the chain attempts to portray a more premium position in the pizza market.

Visual changes include an adjustment to its color palette, a new interior design for its restaurants and new typography. 

The new look comes as the chain works to sustain momentum that has propelled it from a controversy-laden turnaround story into a period of rapid growth amid competitive threats in the quick-service pizza industry. The chain’s long-running tagline—“Better Ingredients. Better Pizza”—will remain a part of the brand and has informed the development of the new visual assets to accompany it.

“‘Better Ingredients, Better Pizza’ is something that is core to this brand, but how does that layer up to a bigger ambition around being always hungry to be better as a company, and what are the building blocks of that?” Max Wetzel, chief commercial officer, said in an interview. “What we’ve heard back from customers is that Papa Johns is a premium brand with the context of our competition, but it’s a brand that really hasn’t evolved that much from a logo standpoint, or from a color palette. And the environment has really changed a lot since that last time we touched our logo. So consumers may have felt it's a little old, maybe a little stale, and there was an opportunity to evolve it.”

Papa Johns engaged the San Francisco design firm Su Mathews Hale Design to reinterpret its logo with a goal of being more flexible and to show up better in digital activations, from which the majority of the chain’s orders originate. The logo maintains is signature arch but drops the apostrophe, and be rendered vertically as well as horizontally. The flatter, simpler look is similar to how other brands have attempted to make logos more digital-friendly, including Nissan, BMW and Volkswagen.

Those “better ingredients” get an emphasis through a new color palette inspired by them—the dominant red and green represent tomato and basil, joined by off-white representing dough, light purple (for garlic) and a yellow-green inspired by pepperoni, providing the brand “bold pops and playful accents,” Wetzel said.

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A custom font, created by the London agency Forpeople in partnership with Colophon Foundry, helps to distinguish how the brand delivers its message. The new type, Wetzel said, was inspired by the “stretchiness” of its pizza dough. The chain will also introduce new illustrations to help with wayfinding in restaurants and online.

Each of these elements is brought to life inside a prototype restaurant meant to inspire customers and workers while enabling a faster and easier experience that supports the chain’s quality ambitions. Delivery workers, for example, will have a clear path from the kitchen to the parking lot. And pick-up customers will be surrounded with reminders of the fresh ingredients that went into their orders. Papa Johns engaged Big Red Rooster to design the new physical environment.

Papa Johns also sees the opportunity to build a deeper emotional connection between the brand and its customers with ads that feature its products as they’re being consumed by customers—something of a new approach for a brand whose advertising has traditionally led with glamor product shots.

The new look and feel for the brand begin this week when its digital properties are updated. Wetzel said the rollout of new restaurant designs will be more deliberate but begin to show up in company locations as soon as early next year.

Papa Johns is making these shifts while its business remains robust behind consumer trends of home meal consumption and home delivery brought about by the pandemic—and sustained through innovations like stuffed-crust pizzas drawing new and repeat shoppers. Board member, brand ambassador and franchisee Shaquille O'Neal starred in a commercial earlier this year for the stuffed crust pizza.

That event helped the brand rebound from a period of soft sales and controversy following the acrimonious departure of founder and chairman John Schnatter in 2018. Schnatter, who founded the company in 1984, resigned after tapes captured him using a racial slur during a media training call with Laundry Service, then the chain's agency, in May 2018. Schnatter until then was Papa John’s commercial spokesman but was wiped from all of its marketing materials upon his departure. In a lawsuit against Laundry Service, Schnatter claimed that he was criticizing someone else’s use of the racial slur when he said it during the May 2018 training call. 

Papa Johns, headquartered in Louisville, Kentucky, is the world’s third-largest pizza delivery company with more than 5,500 restaurants in 50 countries.

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