What Papa John’s is doing to support its business

Papa John’s CEO Rob Lynch, joins Yahoo Finance’s Alexis Christoforous and Brian Sozzi to discuss how the restaurant industry is being impacted amid the coronavirus outbreak.

Video Transcript

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: Joining us now on the phone is Rob Lynch. He is Papa John's CEO. And, Rob, we were talking during the break that you were saying these are unique times. Boy oh boy, you need to say the least. We all want to know, what is Papa John's doing right now? How is this pandemic affecting your business?

ROB LYNCH: Well, thank you for having me. I'm excited to share with you all that we're doing because I do think these are unique times, and I think it provides a lot of companies the opportunity to come together and really help the communities in which we live and serve. And so right now, we're focused on doing all that we can to protect the health and safety of our team members and our customers because we need to ensure that we can continue to deliver, you know, safe, high-quality food. That's first and foremost.

As we look towards the coming weeks, we need to make sure that our communities have what they need-- health care, you know, safety services, first responder, and food. You know, there's been a lot of discussion around grocery stores and the behavior around grocery stores. I think the discussion is just starting up around restaurants. You know, the industry is changing dramatically right now where a lot of my peers who run dine-in restaurants are being asked to close their dining rooms. And I feel really bad for them from a business standpoint, but from a community standpoint, I feel like it's our responsibility, companies that have more of a delivery and takeout model, to pick up the slack and make sure that the communities that we live and work in have the food that they need to persevere through these-- this situation.

So we're focused on, you know, sanitation. We've taken extra measures to keep our restaurants very clean, very sanitized for our employees and for our customers, and we're also implementing new procedures around no-contact delivery and pickup so that we can help our delivery drivers and our customers maintain that safe distance that we've all been told to maintain.

We're also really trying to help out on the jobs front. You know, we believe that we are going to have the need to hire upwards of 20,000 new jobs to service the demand that we foresee coming from the change in the restaurant industry over the coming weeks and potentially months. So we are ramping up our recruiting, training efforts to make sure that we bring people in that are excited about the opportunity to work through these tough times and that we are able to help out our communities by providing people with safe jobs that they can come to work every day.

And then lastly, we're really focused on supporting our communities at the local level. We've established a partnership with the Boys and Girls Club where we're sending food to the clubs to help with kids that used to really depend on schools to deliver their meals every day. Now they're not receiving those meals, and so we're trying to supplement that and help out where we can. We're also focused on making sure that our health-care and first-responder communities are fed, and we are working to try and create, you know, relationships with hospitals and other places in our communities to make sure that we can bring food safely to them. They're working tirelessly to keep us all safe, and we want to make sure that we can help out in any way we can.

So, you know, it's a really, like I said, unique situation, and us as a pizza-delivery company, this is what we do. We're good at it. We understand how to operate this model, and it's our responsibility to make sure we're doing everything we can to help our communities.

BRIAN SOZZI: Hey, Rob, Brian here. Always good to speak with you. Now China, I believe, is your second-largest international market. As that economy has started to pick back up, people go back to work. Has that translated into your business picking back up there?

ROB LYNCH: You know, we did have 50 restaurants close in China, and those closures were a function of them operating in locations that closed-- so primarily shopping centers and shopping malls that were forced to shut down, so hence we had to shut down our restaurants.

Over the last month, we have seen a change in the dynamic over there, and a lot of those shopping centers have opened up, and so our restaurants have opened up. You know, I'm not the health-care professional, but they do seem to be recovering. Our restaurants-- a lot more of our restaurants are opened up and are operating at this point.

So we are open for business in China. We have been open for business in Korea essentially the whole time. Korea is a large market for us as well that was impacted by the coronavirus. And we-- you know, it's a lot more consistent model in Korea, similar with the United States. And so we have been open and operating at scale in Korea throughout the whole scenario. So we feel like we have learned from our international markets and we are adequately prepared to leverage those learnings to make sure that we're doing everything we can here in the States and North America.

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: All right, Rob Lynch, Papa John's CEO, thanks for being with us. Good luck to you and your workers as you navigate this pandemic.