Christou: “I try to ensure that I’m out in the field connecting with our staff and continuing to listen to the things that go well or not so well for them.” (Photo by Jon Enoch)

Christou: “I try to ensure that I’m out in the field connecting with our staff and continuing to listen to the things that go well or not so well for them.” (Photo by Jon Enoch)

When Pano Christou (AMP 195, 2018) was hired at Pret A Manger in 2000, the idea that he would one day run the entire company could not have been further from his mind. At the chain’s Carnaby Street shop, in London’s Soho district, the 22-year-old had enough work just running the night shift.

“I’m a big believer in focusing on the job that you do, and I’ve always wanted to be the best at whatever that was,” says Christou, who did well enough that he was soon promoted to assistant general manager. It was the first step on the way to a series of executive roles with the UK-based company, which eventually led to his being named CEO in 2019.

It’s rare for today’s executive to climb the ranks at a single company. Christou found that the experience of rising from the front lines to the C-suite left him ideally positioned to lead Pret through the toughest times the company had ever faced. When he took over, Pret, reportedly valued at $1.9 billion when it was acquired in 2018 by JAB Holdings, had more than 550 shops, with the majority in London and outposts in major cities worldwide. But just a few months into his term, the pandemic changed everything. Pret’s sales fell by more than 90 percent. Within a few weeks, a decade of growth had been wiped off the books. “It was quite a baptism by fire,” Christou recalls of the painful need to lay off a third of his workforce. “Suddenly, there was no business. So we had to do things differently.”

Christou had already been planning some changes but the pandemic accelerated the timeline. Even after lockdowns had been lifted, it was clear that Pret could no longer rely as heavily on the office workers and commuters who had once been its core customers. “The Pret sandwich was very much a white-collar staple,” he says. “It was a single-channel business.”

Among Christou’s first steps was to establish a data system that would help the company better understand its customers by tracking up to 80 percent of transactions. That led company leadership to ask how regular customers could be persuaded to come in more often—a question answered by a drink subscription service called Club Pret. The program, which costs $40 a month in the United States for up to five barista-prepared drinks a day, and additional discounts, has proven popular with Pret’s traditional customers and blue-collar workers and families looking for a deal. In 2022, the company reported nearly 60 million redemptions worldwide. “What this subscription has done is really help to democratize the brand,” he explains.

Under Christou’s leadership, Pret also expanded into the suburbs and embraced franchising. The model is new for Pret but it’s a familiar one for Christou, who got his first job at McDonald’s as a 16-year-old, flipping burgers near his South London home.

What started out as a way to make money while he went to school soon looked more like a career, as he was promoted from crew member to supervisor and eventually to a McDonald’s store manager. Pret—whose menu includes upscale salads and baguette sandwiches, made fresh daily—fills a different niche in the market, but Christou learned a lot from that first experience in the industry. And his time behind the counter has served him well as a higher-level manager, in no small part because of the credibility it has earned him.

“I try to ensure that I’m out in the field connecting with our staff and continuing to listen to the things that go well or not so well for them,” he says. “It helps that they know I started on the shop floor, because the intricacies of running a Pret shop are quite hard to understand unless you’ve actually been there.” In 2022, Pret returned to profitability. In March 2023, it gave employees their third across-the-board raise in a year. And last June, the company reported 20 percent sales growth over the previous six months. As it opens more locations in current markets and expands into new ones, Pret has announced that it’s on track to double in size by the end of 2026.

“We’ve come through the crisis,” Christou says. “We have a product that is very well-tailored, I think, for the consumers of tomorrow: high quality, great provenance, strong ESG credentials, a healthy slant to it. And we sit here today with a brand that is primed to become a true global player. I think it’s now on us to double down. I have aspirations of Pret being the next Starbucks—or McDonald’s.”

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