Papa Murphy’s Is Basically A Ghost Kitchen For Your Oven, And Even That’s Too Much Effort For Gen Z
**Portland, OR** – In the great American fast-food pantheon, there are tiers. You’ve got your Michelin stars, your Five Guys’ “I’m paying $18 for a burger and a sad look,” and then you’ve got the bargain-bin basement where the fluorescent lights hum a death knell and the only thing fresh is the despair. Right now, Papa Murphy’s is clinging to that bottom rung with greasy, dough-covered fingers, and honestly, it’s a miracle they haven’t slipped off into the void of forgotten mall food courts yet.
The take-and-bake pizza chain, which essentially pioneered the concept of “we did half the work so you can do the rest because we’re too cheap to buy an oven,” is in a full-blown existential crisis. And by “crisis,” I mean they’re closing stores faster than a freshman drops a class after the first lecture. The company, which was already struggling to stay relevant in a world that has DoorDash and a 24/7 grocery store, recently announced a slew of closures, and the financials are looking about as appetizing as a cold slice of their "Cowboy" pizza left out for three days.
Let’s be real for a second. Who is the target demographic for Papa Murphy’s in 2025? Is it the exhausted millennial parent who remembers the glory days of 2010 when this seemed like a genius life hack? Sure. But that parent is now just ordering Domino’s on the app and paying the $4.99 delivery fee because they’re too tired to even preheat their own oven. Is it the Gen Z renter with a studio apartment that has a kitchen the size of a shoebox and a landlord who installed a "cooking appliance" that’s really just a hot plate with delusions of grandeur? They’re ordering a single slice from the local hipster joint and calling it a meal.
Papa Murphy’s is stuck in the uncanny valley of food service. It’s not fast food, because you have to wait 20 minutes for them to assemble a pizza. It’s not delivery, because you have to physically drive there. And it’s not home cooking, because you are paying someone else to do 60% of the work, and then you have to do the other 40% while your kids scream and your dog barks at the smoke detector you forgot to disable. You’re basically paying a premium to be an unpaid line cook for a minimum-wage employee.
The math is brutal. You’re paying $12.99 for a large pizza that you have to bake yourself. For that same $12.99, you could get a frozen DiGiorno for like $5 and have $8 left over for a bottle of cheap wine to drown the sorrow of a mediocre Tuesday night. Or, for $2 more, you could use a delivery app and get a hot, slightly-greasy pizza that’s ready to eat the second the driver hands it to you. The convenience economy has eaten Papa Murphy’s lunch, and it didn’t even have the decency to leave a tip.
Let’s talk about the store experience, shall we? Walking into a Papa Murphy’s is like stepping into a time warp to 2008. The décor is aggressively beige. The staff looks like they’re being held hostage. The glass case displays pizzas that look like they’ve been assembled with the same level of care as a middle schooler’s science fair volcano. It’s not a food purchase; it’s a hostage negotiation. You’re standing there, staring at a kid who’s clearly on their third energy drink of the shift, as they slap pepperoni onto a circle of dough with the enthusiasm of a DMV employee stamping forms. You’re not just buying a pizza; you’re buying into a system of mutual disappointment.
And don’t even get me started on the “fresh” angle. Papa Murphy’s loves to pitch itself as “fresh, never frozen.” Okay, cool. So is the arugula at my local Whole Foods, but I don’t have to drive to a strip mall, wait for a teenager to roll out dough, and then haul it back to my house to cook it myself. The “fresh” pitch is a giant neon sign that screams “we have no other value proposition.” It’s the food service equivalent of a guy on a dating app putting “I’m a nice guy” in his bio. If you have to say it, it’s probably not true, or at least not enough to matter.
The real kicker? Their parent company, MTY Food Group, is probably looking at their quarterly earnings report and wondering if they accidentally invested in a money-laundering operation for a failed 1990s mall franchise. The closures are hitting the West Coast and Midwest hardest, which is hilarious because those are the exact places where people are supposed to be too lazy to cook. But apparently, even lazy people have standards. The stock is tanking, the foot traffic is dead, and the only people still buying are the boomers who think "take-and-bake" is a cool new technological advancement.
Let’s also address the elephant in the room: the "Papa" himself. Who is this guy? Is he a benevolent patriarch who just wants you to enjoy a family dinner? Or is he the ghost of some 1980s marketing executive who’s haunting the company from beyond the grave, whispering “lower prices, add more cheese, ignore the changing times”? The brand identity is so dated it might as well have a fax machine in the logo. They’re trying to sell us on the nostalgia of a family dinner, but the only thing they’re really delivering is the anxiety of having to clean a pizza pan afterward.
The company’s attempts to pivot have been laughable. They tried to push "individual pizzas" for one, which is just admitting that you’re so lonely you’re willing to bake a whole pizza for yourself and eat it
Final Thoughts
Let’s be honest: Papa Murphy’s isn’t just struggling with the economics of a post-pandemic dine-in boom; it’s fighting a fundamental identity crisis. The “take-and-bake” model was a brilliant novelty in 1995, but in an era of $5 delivery apps and grocers selling raw dough, the brand’s value proposition—paying full price for a half-finished product—has become a hard sell. The real lesson here isn’t about crusts or toppings, but that in the brutally efficient restaurant game, you can’t survive on a gimmick if you refuse to evolve your core concept.