Snappy is under new ownership who is moving the company forward in both operations and franchising.
Tim Gayhart, current owner and CEO of pizza company Snappy, will admit his brand’s history is no Cinderella story, but what it does have it heart and gumption.
In 1978, founder Bob Rotunda was betting on a racehorse whose name was Snappy Tomato. He’d won some money off that racehorse and used his winnings to start a pizzeria called Snappy Tomato Pizza in Fort Mitchell, Kentucky.
Since then, the brand — which underwent a recent name change to “Snappy” has become a local Kentucky favorite.
A few years after opening, Rotunda began franchising and sold his brand to a company that grew it in the 1980s. In the early 90s, Gayhart got involved in Snappy when it merged with a pizza brand out of Cincinnati, which is where he got his start at the age of 14. There were 13 Snappy Tomato locations and 13 Spooners Pizzas which merged into one company.
The brand had two sauces at the time, the sweeter Snappy sauce and the spicier Spooners sauce. Eventually, Snappy worked itself out of the Spooners offerings.
Gayhart said the company had been “unguided” for years and franchisees have been tasked with growing their own businesses.
“There was never a strong presence of any corporate brand locations,” Gayhart said, “and not a lot of reinvesting in the brand over the years.
“The product has always been good, and it’s been a strong presence in the local market, but a lot of the growth efforts had kind of fizzled out just because there wasn’t any effort supporting (franchisees) over the years.”
Gayhart had actually lost his job when Spooners sold to Snappy — he had to go to one of the franchisees and ask if he could be their general manager in Western Hills, Ohio, and they hired him on to run that one location.
By the age of 21, Gayhart had purchased his own franchised location — a store that had failed in West Chester, Ohio. Two years later, Gayhart was working in the Snappy corporate office helping develop stores and grow the corporate team.
Gayhart resigned when he saw the corporate team wasn’t supporting franchisees the way he thought it should be. He’d offered to buy the company from its owner then, or to buy enough shares to get a seat on the Board of Directors to have a say in how the company was run.
In the 1990s, he started opening Snappys himself, snapping up underperforming stores. In 2001, he was able to obtain and grow an area development — the state of Kentucky.
From 2001 until now, he’s built, bought and sold more than 30 Snappy locations. Today, there are 47 stores, eight of which are corporate owned. Two years ago, he bought Snappy outright.
“It’s not a Cinderella story by any means,” Gayhart said. “It doesn’t fill out all the checkmarks on how some of these companies grow one to a thousand overnight, but we’re on that path now.”
Gayhart is reinvesting in Snappy and adding the support the brand required years ago. Over the years, he said he’s learned what the franchisee needs and what a multi-store owner requires to be successful.
“We’re strong because of the owners, and now it’s our time to turn the brand around and start supporting (the franchisees) better and having them be successful because of the work the brand’s doing,” Gayhart said.
On the menu
Dough is made fresh daily on site, and it is a hand-tossed traditional crust.
“It’s all about the quality, right? When you make your own dough and you have your own recipe, and the bake of the product and the quality of the product and the freshness — you can’t go wrong,” Gayhart said. “Your supply chain is yourself.”
Sauces and meats are formulated to Snappy’s specifications. Gayhart said there’s a fine line between wanting to use the highest quality ingredients while at the same time keeping food costs down for franchisees to be successful.
Popular pizzas on the menu include the Ranch Pizza and a similar LTO, the Chicken Bacon Ranch Pizza. The Beast, which is a foot-and-a-half by two-feet pizza equivalent to three large pizzas is also popular, as is the Snapperoni, a double pepperoni and double cheese offering.
Pizzas are baked in conveyor ovens for consistency and high volume output. Gayhart said calibration audits and training seem commonplace for most pizzerias, but they were something he had to revisit when he bought the company. “You’re only as strong as the location next to us,” Gayhart added. “We all share customers in today’s world.”
He said of course the brand wants the breadsticks in one location to be identical to another, so the brand rewrote its operations manual, recipe builds and calibration guidelines. They’ve already replaced 13 ovens that were subpar in the two years he’s owned the company.
Gayhart added that the quality and consistency of the product sets Snappy apart from the competition. “Our pizza sauce is the freshest sauce out there that you can get,” he said, adding that Snappy partners with premium sauce manufacturer Stanislaus to prepare sauce to Snappy’s specifications.
Tomatoes are harvested and canned specifically for Snappy once a year. “From the harvest to being canned, it’s eight hours,” Gayhart said, “so it’s an extremely fresh tomato and what that does is leaves us the ability not to add a bunch of additives to our sauce to get the flavor. We do add for our flavor profile, but we don’t have to add sugar. We add a little sugar, but we don’t have to add a lot of sugar because it’s so fresh. The fresher the tomato, the sweeter the tomato (and) also the less acidic the tomato is.”
Operations
Rebranding efforts were launched this summer with Snappy Tomato Pizza simply being called Snappy, representing the company’s commitment to fast and friendly service while honoring its roots. The brand refresh included updated décor, redesigned stores and a new logo.
“Consistency starts from the phone call (placing an order) to the time you pull up to the restaurant, and product is important, but a lot of people, they make a determination about how that product is before it even goes into their palate to taste it,” Gayhart said. “You have to have all those things echoing the same level of quality and consistency in order to ensure your pizza is as great as it is.”
When Gayhart purchased the company, he wanted to rewrite the brand’s story to highlight the freshness of its ingredients, so customers didn’t think of Snappy as a deeply discounted pizza and instead put it in the same category as the signature brands who use premium ingredients.
“People will know when they pay for a product, that they’re getting that quality. And then that experience with our local store owners and the rebranding of the images and modernization of the facilities, that they really feel an enhanced value when they visit our restaurants,” he said.
Carryout and delivery are available at every location, dine-in is available at several stores, and 16 units offer buffets. The unit model depends on the town, but the buffet concept, which also offers dine-in and carryout all day and buffets either all day or during the lunch daypart, offers a higher sales volume for franchisees.
Gayhart said the biggest challenge he’s faced since he took over brand operations had been getting franchising structurally sound again.
“It was really all over the board more than I had anticipated,” he said. “Just documentation. Interaction with the franchisees. They’d been left alone for so long it was a challenge to get them to engage and believe in the brand again. We had to revisit franchise documents (and) location leases. We had to request financial information from all of them. We needed to show that the chain is stable and that we had a great platform to grow from, and then we had to create all the consistency.”
Now that they’ve done that, Gayhart said both corporate-store and franchise-unit openings are on solid ground. He hopes to have 60 to 65 Snappy open by the end of 2028, focusing on Tennessee, Indiana, Ohio and Kentucky. He plans to buy back franchise locations for those who want out and focus on corporate units and new franchised restaurants as well.
“That kind of growth strategy – we had to make sure that we had a platform that we could speak to with knowledge and confidence about what kind of numbers our store can run, what kind of numbers our new locations can do and how strong our brand is. … It had to turn into long, well thought-out plan to turn this brand into something,” Gayhart said.
“Our product is excellent. Most of the time when things fail or succeed, it’s not the product usually. It’s the operations.”
From PizzaMarketplace.com