POD, the London-based, healthy fast food concept led by Tim Hall, is to consolidate its estate before returning to the acquisition trail next year, M&C Report understands.
The 23-strong group is set to place three of its smaller sites on the market – Fleet Street, New Road and Queen Victoria Street – as it looks to concentrate on its larger store format.
The company doubled in size by the end of the financial year in October 2012 – an aggressive expansion rate that Hall says was too fast although necessary to establish the brand’s place in the exploding fast-casual sector.
In a recent interview with M&C Report Hall said that he was relieved that the “hit rate has been excellent” in terms of the new sites the company had opened.
Since that “crazy” time of growth, he has concentrated on galvanising the company infrastructure and reappraising the brand before embarking on the next phase of expansion, which will be at a much more manageable pace of six sites a year, reaching 40 by the end of 2015.
He said: “We have been reviewing the overall look and feel of all the stores and by the end of this year you will start to see the rollout of some exciting changes.
A lot of the values we launched with were seen as pioneering at the time – things like health, caring for the environment and provenance – but they are now mainstream.
“Seven years ago, none of the other operators cared about things such as packaging, but now you would think they were born in a furnace of environmental awareness.
“I recognise we didn’t invent those values, but now they are mainstream we are going to implement a big change in the way we position Pod because we believe the things for which customers have always seen Pod as pioneering are no longer pioneering.
“There are things about Pod that are genuine and valued and that make it stand out in our marketplace, but the issue is we have not been shouting about those things; we have been shouting about the things that everyone is now shouting about.”
