Herbies has been putting pizzas through the oven for a quarter of a century. They've been on Andromeda for most of it. A short note on what that kind of longevity actually looks like.
"We've outlasted three high-street trends, two recessions and one pandemic. The till hasn't moved. The pizza hasn't either."
Most food businesses don't see five years, let alone twenty-five. The ones that do tend to share a handful of unglamorous traits — tight control of food cost, a manager who walks the floor every shift, and a technology stack that doesn't get in the way.
Herbies Pizza has all three. And after a recent chat with the team, we wanted to mark the milestone here on the blog — partly because they deserve the nod, and partly because their story is genuinely instructive for operators at the start of that journey.
Dough, sauce and training haven't changed. Everything else has — ordering channels, payment methods, delivery apps, staff generations. The product is the anchor.
Food cost, labour and repeat rate reviewed every week, not every quarter. A 0.5% drift in food cost is a conversation by Monday morning.
Loyalty isn't a scheme at Herbies — it's the team knowing a customer's usual order, postcode and how they like the box labelled. The tech just keeps up.
We don't do victory laps when a customer renews. We'd rather they just keep running without thinking about us — because the best compliment a platform can get is that it fades into the background. Herbies, to their credit, barely call. When they do, it's usually because they want a new feature added, not because something's broken.
Over the 25 years, they've rolled with every change the industry threw at them: phone orders to online orders to app orders to aggregator orders. The POS has absorbed each new channel without the team having to relearn their jobs. That's the job of a platform — and it's the bit we're proudest of.
To everyone at Herbies — from the owners and the pizza chefs who've stayed through it all, to the newer faces on the dispatch and delivery side — here's to the next 25. You've been one of the quiet examples of what this industry does well when it's done properly.
If you're reading this and you've got a similar milestone coming up, drop us a line — we love telling these stories.
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