It’s no secret that pizza chains are struggling. Over the last several months alone, Pizza Hut and Papa Johns announced hundreds of closures.
That pizzapocalypse trend continues this month, with the owner of the popular U.S. pizza chain Papa Murphy’s announcing it will close up to 50 locations. Here’s what you need to know.
What’s happened?
Last week, the Canadian fast-casual and quick-service dining conglomerate MTY Food Group announced its earnings for the second quarter of 2026.
The earnings were rough. For the quarter, MTY brought in revenue of $279.9 million CAD, down 8.2% from the period a year earlier. MTY attributed the decline to “lower revenue from corporate stores, which was tightly correlated to a decrease in the number of corporate-owned locations,” among other factors.
But on the company’s earnings call, later that day, MTY also confirmed that it will close more corporate-owned locations, most notably, the “take and bake” pizza chain Papa Murphy’s.
MTY Food Group owns dozens of restaurant brands in the U.S. and Canada, including Baja Fresh Mexican Grill, Blimpie, Cold Stone Creamery, Planet Smoothy, and Wetzel’s Pretzels.
But Papa Murphy’s, via its corporate-owned and franchised stores, has one of MTY’s largest retail footprints in America.
The pizza chain’s stores are currently found in 34 U.S. states and, according to a Papa Murphy’s franchise disclosure document, there were a total of 1,014 Papa Murphy’s stores as of November 2025.
In the United States, those stores included 965 franchised locations and 49 company-operated locations.
However, it now looks as if MTY will close the majority of its company-owned Papa Murphy’s locations.
How many Papa Murphy’s locations are closing?
On the company’s most recent earnings call, MTY’s CEO, Eric Lefebvre, announced that it would close 68 company-owned stores across its brands in the near future.
While these 68 locations won’t all be Papa Murphy’s stores, the majority of them will be.
Lefebvre told analysts that between 45 and 50 of the store closures will be Papa Murphy’s locations, with the remainder being stores under the company’s other banners.
Why are Papa Murphy’s locations closing?
Speaking broadly about the total 68 store closures, Lefebvre said that the selected stores were “performing significantly worse than the average,” according to a PitchBook transcript of the call.
In choosing the locations to close, MTY looked at several factors, including “the performance, outlook, [and] economic profile of each location.”
“Where we saw path improvement, we chose to continue investing efforts into making our existing assets as productive as they can be,” Lefebvre said. “Where the fundamentals no longer supported that path, we made the decision to close the store.”
Speaking more specifically about the pizza industry, Lefebvre said it was an extremely competitive space in the United States, noting that Papa Murphy’s was suffering more than other brands.
“We run different promotions and we see that there’s very little loyalty in that market and the consumer will go where the pizza is the cheapest at any given time.”
Papa Murphy’s stands out among well-known pizza chains such as Domino’s and Pizza Hut. It is primarily a “take and bake” chain, where customers go to the store, order the pizza they want, and are given it uncooked. The customers then go home and put it in their ovens to cook.
Lefebvre noted that while promotional activity is “super productive,” MTY also needs to protect its franchisees’ profit margins. “So our teams are actively seeking more data on all the promotions we run to try to adjust them to make it as profitable as possible for our franchisees.”
Which Papa Murphy’s locations are closing?
Right now, MTY has not specified which Papa Murphy’s locations would close. Currently, the chain has stores in 34 states, which include both franchisee and corporate locations. Those states are:
- Alabama
- Alaska
- Arizona
- Arkansas
- California
- Colorado
- Florida
- Georgia
- Idaho
- Illinois
- Indiana
- Iowa
- Kansas
- Kentucky
- Louisiana
- Michigan
- Minnesota
- Missouri
- Montana
- Nebraska
- Nevada
- New Mexico
- North Carolina
- North Dakota
- Oklahoma
- Oregon
- South Carolina
- South Dakota
- Tennessee
- Texas
- Utah
- Washington
- Wisconsin
- Wyoming
When will the Papa Murphy’s locations close?
Lefebvre said some of the company’s 68 closing stores, which include Papa Murphy’s locations, will begin closing as early as this week. He added that it will take between six and nine months to shutter all the locations marked for closure.
