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NEW YORK — Your next visit to a Pizza Hut might remind you of Chipotle.
The chain on Tuesday unveiled a new design concept that features a pizza-making station at the center of the restaurant, allowing customers to see employees make their orders. It's part of broader changes Pizza Hut is showing off at a remodeled location as the chain contends with sluggish sales and increasing competition.
Also at the Plano, Texas, restaurant is a modernized interior that has touchscreen kiosks for customers to place orders and heated cabinets for pick-up. The exterior has a drive-thru lane with serving a new "Hut 'N Go" menu, which features new digital menu boards and serves pre-made foods in an attempt to reduce wait times.
Pizza Hut and its rivals are struggling as inflation-weary customers hunt for value. The industry faces intense competition from third-party delivery apps that have replaced pizza delivery — an American mainstay — with other options, including McDonald's, for people's to-go orders, according to Jonathan Maze, editor-in-chief at Restaurant Business Magazine.
Maze told CNN that Pizza Hut has a "weird history" because it started off as a full-service restaurant until Domino's rose to prominence and "started the commoditization of the pizza business," which resulted in consumers having little loyalty among brands.
"As delivery and take-out took hold, pizza became more of a food that you ate at home rather than in a restaurant," he said. "The model that Pizza Hut had used successfully for a few decades was going out of style."
The remodeled location is the same size and has the same number of employees as its predecessor. Pizza Hut is testing the design in Texas before potentially rolling it out to other U.S. cities, though it has about 2,000 of these redesigned restaurants internationally.
The Texas location marks the first time it has brought the format to the United States, but it includes some added touches, such as the touchscreen kiosks and the front-facing pizza making station.
"We know the consumer is expecting speed, accuracy and an incredible product, but is also expecting an experience," Shannon Garcia, Pizza Hut's president of global franchise markets and global operations, told CNN. "The time is right when we think about a post-pandemic world that has become much more digital."
Part of that experience is putting employees front and center with a Chipotle-esque pizza-making station that has been "wildly successful" at its international locations and led to increased sales, Garcia said.
"This showcases why experience matters," she said. "It's not just about ease and reducing the friction, but this front-front facing experience does correlate to a different experience for consumers that also drives an increase in business and transactions."
Pizza Hut, owned by Yum Brands could use that, after experiencing a 1% decline in same-store sales in its most recent quarter.
