The Sunday Times April 10, 2022 7
BUSINESS
its airport shops to keep staff. About
95 per cent of its 9,900 UK workers now
earn at least £10 an hour.
The cost pressures are coming from
every direction. Ukraine is the largest
exporter of sunflower oil in the world and
the spring sowing season has been hit by
the war. It is also a big exporter of wheat,
which has jumped in price since the inva-
sion and is a key ingredient in almost
every single Pret product.
Then there’s VAT: this month, the rate
payable by hospitality businesses went
back to the pre-pandemic level of 20 per
cent, up from the 12.5 per cent it had been
since September. And the price of coffee
beans is due to increase by 40 per cent
this year.
Pret is not alone. “You can see it every-
where,” says Christou. He insists on com-
paring prices every two weeks with Pret’s
rivals to remain competitive.
He has also had to deal with the impact
of Brexit and the fallout from the death of
a young woman who had an allergic reac-
tion after eating a Pret baguette.
We have arranged to meet in the store
underneath Pret’s HQ in London’s Victo-
ria. Christou wants to take me on his
“favourite” tour, into some of the shops
he worked in as a Pret store manager, and
we are due to head off past Buckingham
Palace to the West End.
Christou, who lives in Hackney, is
dressed for the occasion in the East Lon-
don hipster uniform of ankle-grazing
jeans, a Levi’s shirt and a pair of New Bal-
ance trainers. He gave up wearing a suit
when he took over as chief executive.P
ret was started in 1986 by Julian Met-
calfe and Beecham from a single
shop in central London, where they
sold made-to-order sandwiches.
Queues soon began forming on the
street outside at lunchtime, and they
decided to stock fridges with sandwiches
prepared in its kitchens — allowing cus-
tomers to “grab and go”.
Today’s operation is somewhat slicker,
but the principle is the same, with sand-
wiches still prepared on site in its cafés.
Before we set off to Mayfair, it’s a nosy in
the kitchen, where Rihanna is blasting
through the speakers and the final batch
of sandwiches is being made for the end
of the lunchtime rush. The first workers
arrived at 5am to begin preparing the 800
products that would be sold that day. We
wander into the walk-in fridge, stacked
with tomatoes, lettuce and other fresh
ingredients, and Christou grabs a slab of
butter off the shelf. “Only the best-quality
President butter,” he declares proudly.
If he is keen to show off Pret’s creden-
tials for freshness, it’s because he needs
to convince customers to stick with it
amid the rising prices. Sales plunged
from £708 million in 2019 to £299 million
in 2020 as stores were forced to close.
Even when lockdown ended, the
enduring advice to work from home left
Pret, which expanded rapidly in the
shadow of skyscrapers across London
and other big cities, uniquely exposed.
Sales in stores in St Paul’s, Bank and
Canary Wharf fell 90 per cent as City
workers stayed away — with the occa-
sional builder coming in for a lonely
bacon roll. Even today, trade has recov-
ered to pre-pandemic levels only on
Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays.
In response, Pret has grown outside
central London and launched a line of
packaged goods into Tesco including
granola and frozen croissants. Today, itsfastest-growing shop is in York, up
130 per cent on January 2020 levels. Lon-
don’s suburbs are up 124 per cent.
Christou thinks there is space for Pret to
more than double the number of stores in
the UK, while it is expanding into the Mid-
dle East with a franchise partner and has
signed a deal for a trial in Canada. It also
has sites in the US, Hong Kong and Dubai.
Last week it completed a deal in Ireland.
Pret has branched out into delivery,
too, with its croissants and coffees availa-
ble to order on apps such as Deliveroo
and Just Eat. In Tooting, where Christou
spent his childhood, delivery makes up
50 per cent of sales.
Growing up, Christou, whose father
was a minicab driver, would have consid-
ered lunches at Pret a luxury. His Greek
Cypriot mother was a nurse before work-
ing for Woolwich Building Society.
Money was tight. “My parents would take
me to jumble sales to get clothes,” he
says. School was also tough. Christou
admits he got into “one or two” fights at
Ernest Bevin College.
Instead of going to university, he
turned a part-time job at McDonald’s into
a full-time vocation and spent a year
working night shifts and weekends. “I did
everything to better myself — whether it
was being asked to clean a toilet or work-
ing unsociable hours,” says Christou,
whose upbringing in south London is still
evident in his estuary accent. Today, he
looks for this “grit” and drive when hiring.
In 2000, at the age of 22, he left to
become assistant manager at Pret’s shop
on Carnaby Street in central London, and
worked his way up to be managing
director of Pret UK in 2016. He was made
chief operating officer at the start of 2019
— months after Pret was sold for £1.5 bil-
lion by its private equity backer Bridge-
point to the German consumer goodsWe’re lucky we
have passionate
customers. They
hold us to account,
but it’s better than
not having them September, an inquest will be held into
the death of Celia Marsh, a mother of five
who died in 2017 at the age of 42 after eat-
ing a “super-veg rainbow flatbread” con-
taining yoghurt. It was supposed to be
dairy free. The tragedies prompted the
introduction of a law that all food chains
must now display allergy information.
As we stroll to the next shop, further
down Piccadilly, Christou demonstrates
the newest installation — a computer
screen that displays allergen information
for each product. On the upcoming
inquest, he “can’t go into detail”, but
insists that Pret is working to ensure the
“safest environment for our customers”.
Pret has also been at the sharp end of
customer fury. In December, it received
more than 5,000 complaints about its
subscription offer, with some shoppers
complaining of being told that cold
drinks were unavailable.
Back in Victoria, and after 8,000 steps,
Christou diplomatically suggests Pret
should consider itself “lucky” it has such
a “passionate customer base”. “Yes, they
hold us to account and have high expec-
tations, but I’d much prefer that than not
to have them.”conglomerate JAB Holdings — before
being promoted to the top job.
Metcalfe, who led Pret while Christou
was beginning his career, says the new
chief executive has “done very well”, but
says: “There’s no doubt it’s a very difficult
time for that style of business. Businesses
like Pret, which are [more than] three
decades old, need to innovate like crazy.”
Although sales have rebounded, the
past two years have been rough. Christou
had to announce 3,000 redundancies in
August 2020 as some stores were closed
permanently and a further 400 workers
were let go in the October. “We had to
make a lot of difficult decisions during
Covid,” he admits. Prior to Brexit, it was
famed for employing large numbers of
EU workers. Now there are a larger num-
ber of UK nationals — with more part-time
workers, many of whom are students.
Christou has also had to drive an over-
haul of Pret’s allergy labelling. Natasha
Ednan-Laperouse, 15, suffered a cardiac
arrest on a British Airways flight in 2016,
and an inquest heard that the baguette
she had eaten had contained sesame, to
which she was allergic, but the ingredient
had not been listed on the packaging. In* INDUSTRY DATAUUUUU
Chicken,
from the UKBacon,
from the UKMayo,
from the UKItalian cheese,
made in
Austria,
matured in ItalyButter,
from France10% 9% 70% 40% 50%A legend in his
own lunchtime?
Pano Christou
pours the drinks
at a Pret A
Manger in
London Victoria.
The chief
executive
spends a day a
week visiting the
chain’s sitesTOM STOCKILL FOR THE SUNDAY TIMESThe cab driver’s son battling to
keep your Pret sarnie affordable
A
n hour into a walking tour of
Pret A Manger’s shops in cen-
tral London, Pano Christou
stops in his tracks. His face
darkens. It’s 1.30pm and an
engineer is fiddling with a
big silver fridge bang in the
middle of the busy shop
floor in Pret on Piccadilly.
Christou, the chief execu-
tive of the chain, is perplexed. This is
Pret’s rush hour, when it hopes to shift
hundreds of sandwiches to office work-
ers. But the crowds are being forced to
squeeze around the metal box. “What
they shouldn’t be doing is trying to repair
this at lunchtime,” Christou complains.
The shop manager appears and is
politely admonished. “Did they have to
fix it now?” Christou asks, before suggest-
ing the engineer comes back later.
A fridge in the middle of the shop is
small fry compared to the problems
Christou has been forced to navigate over
the past two years. Sales plunged in the
depths of the pandemic and thousands of
staff were laid off. It was a fight for sur-
vival. The chain stayed afloat thanks only
to £285 million pumped into the business
by its shareholder, JAB Holdings, and
co-founder Sinclair Beecham.
Today, even as workers return to offi-
ces and customers to its stores, Pret and
its rivals are being forced to hike prices as
they stare down the barrel of double-digit
inflation, while the same rise in the cost
of living threatens to dent consumer
spending. Pret’s bestseller, a tuna and
cucumber baguette, has risen from £2.99
in December to £3.15 today — a jump of
5.4 per cent. A chicken Caesar and bacon
baguette has gone up 6.5 per cent from
£3.99 to £4.25. The Pret coffee and drinks
subscription, which allows customers up
to five drinks a day, is up by £5 to £25.
These price rises are way ahead of the
official rate of inflation, 6.2 per cent.
There are predictions it could soon reach
double digits. The 25 per cent increase in
Pret’s subscription is an early taste. “My
sense is that we could get there by the end
of the year,” Christou says, nervously.
A shop manager himself before being
promoted to Pret’s executive team, Chris-
tou understands better than many bosses
how staff will also feel the squeeze. He
has done every job in the business, and
although he was made chief executive in
2019, he still spends at least one day a
week in one of Pret’s 417 UK shops. Pret
has twice been forced to increase pay atINTERVIEW
SABAH
MEDDINGSJust as sales recover from lockdowns and office workers return, Pano Christou faces enormous rises in costs
BAGUETTE
UNPACKED
The rising cost of a
Pret favouriteTHE LIFE OF PANO CHRISTOU
VITAL STATISTICS
Born: November 22, 1977
Status: married to Vanessa,
also 44. The couple have two
boys, aged 12 and 8
School: Ernest Bevin College
in Tooting, London — Sadiq
Khan’s old school
First job: McDonald’s in
Wandsworth, aged 16
Pay: £300,000 in 2020. “I’m
not paid like public directors”
Home: Hackney, east London
Car: none; Brompton bicycle
Favourite book: Endurance:
Shackleton’s Incredible
Voyage to the Antarctic, by
Alfred Lansing
Film: The Beach
Drink: craft beer
Music: Carl Cox, the techno
record producer and DJ
Gadget: Garmin watch
Charity: The Pret
Foundation, Cancer
Research UK
Last holiday:
Barcelona in the
summerWORKING DAY
The chief executive of Pret A
Manger “doesn’t sleep much”
and is usually awake by 5am,
without an alarm. He speaks
to his teams in Asia in the
morning, Europe during the
day, and New York into the
evening.
Pano Christou likes to
spend each Friday in the
shops. Mondays and
Tuesdays are for Pret’s
Victoria headquarters, where
he hot-desks along with
everyone else — he doesn’t
have his own office.
For the rest of the week, he
spends time with his senior
team. “I generally try to do
one-to-ones while I’m
walking around town,” he
says, “so I get to be with them
out of the office.”
In the evenings, he spends
an hour or two with his
children before working into
the evening.DOWNTIME
Christou runs three times a
week and plays tennis. He
enjoys going to restaurants
near his home in east
London, which has a “terrific”
food scene. “We’re always
out and about,” he says. “I
actually need to be active to
take my mind off things.”Likes of Pano
Christou: The
Beach,
starring
Leonardo
DiCaprio, DJ
Carl Cox, a
Garmin watch,
a Brompton
bike and
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