Pizza Hut Extends Hours as Restaurant Workforce Recovery Boosts Capacity

Pizza Hut is reportedly adding late-night operating hours at thousands of locations across the United States.

It’s a move that comes as the return of restaurant labor enables brands to better meet off-peak demand.

The stores will now remain open until midnight or later, with some staying in operation until as late as 2 a.m., QSR reported Monday (Oct. 16). Pizza Hut is trying to meet increased demand for late-night dining, fueled by the rise of online delivery ordering in recent years, with younger generations especially likely to seek out such options.

PYMNTS Intelligence illuminated younger consumers’ disproportionate demand for delivery options in the report “Connected Dining: Third-Party Restaurant Aggregators Keep the Young and Affluent Engaged,” which drew from a survey of nearly 2,300 U.S. consumers in March. The results revealed that 69% of Generation Z consumers reported having used a third-party food aggregator in the previous six months, a greater share than any other generation, and well above the population-wide average of 40%.

For the delivery itself, the Yum Brands-owned pizza giant is tapping its partnerships with the leading third-party providers, but in order to continue delivering hot pizza into the night, the restaurant still needs to keep its restaurants staffed, which is becoming increasingly possible as the industry’s workforce recovers.

The number of people employed in food services and drinking places is back to where it was pre-pandemic, in February 2020, with the addition of 61,000 during the month of September, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

Additionally, restaurants have grown more efficient throughout this period, leveraging new technologies to reduce their labor needs for day-to-day tasks. Pizza Hut, for its part, has been leveraging technology from Yum Brands’ Dragontail subsidiary, acquired in 2021, to optimize kitchen flow management and driver dispatches.

Across the industry, automation and other tech upgrades are proving key to meeting demand. Data cited in the PYMNTS report “Inflation Puts Technology on the Menu for Restaurants,” the June edition of the “B2B and Digital Payments Tracker®,” created in collaboration with American Express, showed that three-quarters of restaurants use automation in at least three areas of operations.

When restaurants’ labor challenges were at their worst, many establishments had to cut hours. Now, with the workforce recovering, it seems that some brands — especially major chains with extensive resources at their disposal — can consider ramping up to meet demand.

Much of the off-hours demand comes via the delivery channels, such that a move of this kind may make sense for Pizza Hut and other brands with a high off-premise mix, but less sense for restaurants that offer foods that do not travel well. Some restaurants that do not fare well on delivery channels have added virtual brands to their kitchens to drive late-night demand.

“We’ve really wanted to help these restaurants to maximize their underutilized kitchens because every restaurant has these opportunities to sell more food if they had that demand to do so,” Alex Canter, CEO of virtual brand company Nextbite (which was bought in June by hospitality mogul Sam Nazarian), told PYMNTS’ Karen Webster in an interview published in May 2022.