Papa Murphy's, the take-and-bake pizza chain founded in Vancouver, Wash., is preparing to close between 45 and 50 locations after its parent company determined the stores were bleeding money in markets that simply could not support them. The closures are part of a broader pullback by Canadian franchisor MTY Food Group, which plans to shut down 68 underperforming corporate-owned stores across its brand portfolio, locations that collectively lost more than $10 million over the past twelve months.
MTY Food Group CEO Eric Lefebvre laid out the grim numbers on a recent earnings call, as Fox Business reported. The company had repossessed three clusters of Papa Murphy's stores and spent nearly two years trying to turn them around. That effort failed.
The result is a methodical wind-down that Lefebvre said would take six to nine months, with the first batch of stores scheduled to close within days of the announcement. For workers, landlords, and communities that depend on those storefronts, the timeline is already ticking.
Lefebvre did not hold back about the chain's position in the crowded pizza segment. In his own framing, the brand is getting squeezed:
"Papa Murphy's, in such a competitive environment for pizza, is currently suffering a little bit more."
That single line tells the story. The American pizza market is saturated, dominated by national delivery giants, regional favorites, and a growing number of fast-casual concepts. Papa Murphy's occupies a niche as a take-and-bake chain, asking customers to finish cooking at home. In an era of app-driven delivery convenience, that model faces obvious headwinds.
MTY tried to salvage the underperforming clusters. Lefebvre described a deliberate process of repossessing stores, investing in turnaround efforts, and ultimately concluding that certain markets were simply the wrong fit:
"After nearly two years of efforts and some successful turnarounds in those markets, we came to the conclusion that these markets are probably not appropriate for Papa Murphy's at this time, and we chose to close a lot of these stores in these locations."
Two years and more than $10 million in losses. That is not a snap decision. It is the kind of slow-motion failure that corporate leadership often delays acknowledging, and when the acknowledgment finally comes, the damage has already compounded.
The Papa Murphy's closures account for the bulk of the 68 corporate-owned stores MTY plans to shut down, but not all of them. Lefebvre noted that additional locations beyond the pizza chain are also on the chopping block, and that some of those will be costlier to close while yielding larger long-term savings.
He framed the broader closures as strategic rather than panicked:
"It's not a fire sale, but we're also in a process where we can reduce the corporate store portfolio."
That distinction matters. MTY is not dumping assets at any price. But it is also not pretending these stores will recover. Performance across the 68 locations was, in Lefebvre's words, "for the most part deteriorating." The company chose contraction over continued losses.
Lefebvre called the move an "important step" and the "right long-term action for the business," even though it will shrink Papa Murphy's store count in the near term. That is the kind of corporate-speak that sounds reassuring on an earnings call but lands differently for the workers and small-town communities left with a dark storefront.
MTY appears to be managing the closures carefully, at least on paper. Lefebvre emphasized that the company does not want to create collateral damage by moving too fast:
"We have a first series of stores that are scheduled to close next week. And then we're going to go systematically, and we don't want to rush into any of these decisions and cause further damage."
He also pledged to protect staff and handle lease negotiations responsibly:
"We will do things in order to protect the staff, also, that's in the store and take the time to negotiate properly with the landlords, handle all the distribution issues that might arise from closing a certain number of locations."
Whether that promise holds over six to nine months of rolling closures remains to be seen. Franchise and corporate restaurant shutdowns routinely leave hourly workers scrambling for new jobs with little notice, regardless of what executives say on investor calls.
MTY has not disclosed which specific markets or geographic regions will lose Papa Murphy's locations. The company has not said how many total Papa Murphy's stores exist before these closures, making it difficult to gauge the scale of the contraction. And while Lefebvre referenced other brands in the MTY portfolio that will also see corporate-owned closures, he did not name them or break out the numbers.
It is also unclear whether any of the 45 to 50 Papa Murphy's locations might be sold to new franchisees rather than shuttered outright. Lefebvre's "not a fire sale" comment suggests the company is open to deals, but he offered no specifics.
MTY Food Group's stock traded at $23.51 at last check, up $0.30, or about 1.3 percent, a modest move that suggests Wall Street had already priced in some pain.
Papa Murphy's is not the first restaurant chain to discover that a saturated market punishes the marginal player hardest. The American consumer has more options than ever, and less patience for concepts that do not deliver obvious value or convenience. A take-and-bake model that once stood out as a clever alternative now competes against two-dollar delivery apps and dollar-menu deals from chains with far deeper pockets.
MTY spent two years and millions of dollars trying to prove otherwise. The earnings call was the company finally admitting what the numbers had been saying all along.
None of this is a market failure. It is the market working, rewarding what consumers want and clearing out what they don't. The people who deserve attention now are the workers and local operators who will bear the cost of that correction while the corporate balance sheet gets cleaned up.
