Pret A Manger is planning to hire 3,000 more staff, after cutting a similar number of jobs last year.
The sandwich chain says the move is a response to the growing wave of workers returning to city centre offices, with Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays now the busiest days for its outlets, according to Pret boss Pano Christou.
The number of new hires means the company is looking to expand its workforce by about a third. Most of the new jobs will be in its shop/cafes but a small proportion will be in support roles.
Christou also told BBC Radio 4 that Pret could open 200 more shops in the UK over the next two years.
Supply chain issues were, however, still hampering the chain, said Christou: “A couple of weeks ago, we ran out of some prepared fruit for two or three days [and] we were short of a couple of our bread lines for a couple of days.”
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“I think we will see [the driver shortages] until the end of this year and into next year – there’s a real challenge for the industry to navigate through.”
Christou told the BBC the decision to make people redundant last year was the hardest he’d ever have to take in his role. “You have so many people’s lives in your hands and making those decisions was the most difficult thing I had to do in my entire career,” he said.
“When you have to make a call on thousands of people’s jobs, that is something you spend a lot of time thinking through. But it was about how we could ensure that the business would survive and come through Covid.”
Pret said it had received a £100m investment from JAB and Pret founder Sinclair Beecham to accelerate the expansion.
The number of employees now working across the business has grown 28% since the start of 2021, with over 6,000 employees in the UK.
Christou acknowledged that the company had to work to be attractive to potential employees: “Clearly recruitment is a challenge at the moment, and we’re putting everything behind ensuring that we are an employer of choice; that we pay well, that we’ve got the right benefits, and then we’ve got the right bonus available to attract new staff.”
In August, Pret announced it was to permanently to end paid breaks for staff, having originally suspended them in 2020.
But last week, Pret’s UK managing director, Clare Clough, said starting pay for store workers would rise to a minimum of £9.40 an hour, up from the legal minimum of £8.91. However, all team members, including managers would get a raise, she said.
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