Pizza Pilgrims’ co-founder on creating the perfect base for strong growth

Pizza Pilgrim’s co-founder Thom Elliot has hospitality in his veins. In just over a decade, he and his brother James have gone from growing up above a pub in Cornwall to opening their 25th pizzeria this November.

Coming from a family of hospitality workers – their parents owned the pub they lived over – the two brothers have slowly and steadily worked their way up from a stall in Soho.

The self-proclaimed “boring brother”, Elliot is “product-obsessed”, environmentally focused – the company achieved B-corp accreditation earlier this year – and extremely convincing on the merits of strong and steady growth.

“We spent quite a lot of time like trying to pump the brakes rather accelerate,” he says. “We’ve really tried to grow within our means.”

He also loves hospitality: “[Hospitality] is the university of people… you spend your life in a situation with people from all walks of life… you learn so much about working in a team, dealing with difficult people, happy people.”

But it is, he acknowledges, a tough journey: “As an industry, it’s just been through so much in the last three-four years and it’s it pushes you at the best of times.”

‘The biggest challenge for hospitality is consumer sentiment’

Wracked by the pandemic and the subsequent inflation-fuelled cost-of-living crisis, leaders across hospitality have been calling for tax reform and relief in the sector. Many were underwhelmed by the 40 per cent business rate relief announced in the Autumn Budget and the 1.2 per cent increase to employers’ national insurance contributions (NICs), which will push costs up.

But Elliot is at least somewhat optimistic: “We’ve broadly seen [that] demand is there.”

“The biggest challenge for hospitality is consumer sentiment… not knowing [Budget policies] for so long has been a problem.”

He adds that while the Budget didn’t announce the reform to business rates he wanted, it buoyed his hopes that change will come.

“That was the biggest nod we’ve ever seen in a budget to the fact that rates are not sustainable as they are,” he says.

As for the minimum wage, he is “always a believer in increasing [it]… I think it can only be good for the whole country. But you know, it does impact hospitality hard and it’s there’s no doubt about it,” he says. “NICs were obviously out of the blue and that will have an impact.”

But, he says, his policy is to keep calm over things he isn’t able to control. “[If] this is what we’re working with, let’s go and work with it”.

Expanding up by scaling down

As for the things he can control, Elliot is hoping – along with his brother and the rest of the team – to expand Pizza Pilgrims’ offering to entertainment venues via a quick-service, grab-and-go model.

With the experiential leisure industry in the UK rapidly growing and withstanding even a dampened consumer backdrop – there has a 455 per cent increase in ‘combo’ attractions over the past five years – Elliot suggests that there’s “so much interesting opportunity” in this space.

He suggests that for hospitality, the key opportunity is figuring out how to service this trend at big entertainment venues with high-quality, quick food as entertainment prices get higher and customers expect more from their trips out.

“We saw the same transition happen in festivals about 10 years ago… the white burger vans start to go away and the street food starts to come in. The food became as big a part of the sale of going to a festival as the music… that transition will happen.”