By October 2025, most operators had already done the quiet maths for Christmas, how many bodies you can actually recruit, what you can afford to pay, and which “nice-to-haves” are getting shelved until January. The awkward bit is planning festive trading while the November Budget looms and business confidence (per the Institute of Directors) sits at its lowest level in almost a decade. In that mood, this month’s headlines landed like a blunt reminder, size and funding give you options, and everyone else is operating on a shorter fuse.
Pizza Hut’s dine-in collapse was the month’s reality check
The most sobering confirmed story in October was Pizza Hut UK Restaurants entering administration, less than a year after its last rescue. The numbers were brutal and unarguable: the pre-pack process led to the closure of 74 restaurants and the loss of more than 1,700 jobs. Yum! Brands then bought the UK operation in a pre-pack administration deal that saved 64 sites and secured 1,276 jobs.
Why operators should care (even if you’re not in pizza)
This is what happens when a legacy dine-in estate meets modern demand patterns, high occupancy costs, and customers who no longer treat a family meal out as a default weekly habit. Plenty of us have watched footfall soften in secondary retail parks and edge-of-town schemes, exactly the sort of places that used to be dependable for big-box casual dining.
The other lesson is less comfortable: when a brand goes through multiple ownership and restructuring cycles, guest feedback gets weird before it gets better. Service can become inconsistent, maintenance slips, and teams get jumpy about refunds and complaints. Customers do not offer sympathy because your P&L is hurting. They just leave a one-star Google review and move on.
KFC didn’t just “expand”, it swallowed 216 restaurants
If Pizza Hut showed how fast the ground can shift, KFC showed what scale looks like when it’s properly funded. In October, KFC completed the acquisition of Clokken and Clokken Ireland from EG Group, adding 216 KFC restaurants in the UK and Ireland in one move. At the same time, KFC talked up a £1.5bn investment plan over the next five years, aiming to expand its restaurant count by 500 and upgrade existing locations.
KFC also said it plans to open 13 new stores in the last 13 weeks of 2025, and secure “50-plus” new stores as part of the wider investment plan. That’s not a rollout, it’s a land grab.
The chicken arms race
This matters because KFC is not expanding into empty space. Boparan Restaurant Group has a confirmed pipeline of 50 Slim Chickens sites across the UK, Ireland and Europe for 2026, including three new drive-thrus in Q1. Azzurri Group is backing Dave’s Hot Chicken to open 15 UK sites by June 2026.
For operators, this is a warning and an opportunity. The warning is that drive-thru, value-led chicken is becoming a default choice for time-poor customers, especially on retail parks and commuter routes. The opportunity is that these brands win or lose on execution, speed of service, order accuracy, and team confidence at the counter. The product is rarely the problem. The shift pattern usually is.
Côte changed hands, and the mid-market is trying to find its spine again
October also brought a big, clean ownership change: The Karali Group acquired Côte from Partners Group, taking on the full business of around 70 locations. For those of us who’ve watched the mid-market dining segment get squeezed from both ends, this is a proper “line in the sand” moment. Someone is betting that reliable brasserie dining still has a place on the British high street, but only if the offer is tightened and run with discipline.
Alongside that, the funding stories told a similar tale about where lenders see momentum. Honest Burgers completed a debt refinancing with OakNorth to support growth following its acquisition of 12 Gourmet Burger Kitchen sites, and later talked about a record year with turnover of £59.9m, like-for-like sales up 10% and Ebitda up 52.3%.
Integration is where good intentions go to die
None of this is easy in practice. Acquisitions and refinancing don’t magically fix kitchen flow, training gaps, or tired managers who have heard “we’re investing in the brand” before. If Côte’s new owners want customer satisfaction to move, they’ll need obsessive attention on basics across London, the commuter belt, and the regional cities where the brand trades hard. Same with Honest, conversions are where standards wobble and online reviews often get harsher, not kinder, because regulars notice every change.
Government keeps talking about “late nights” while operators price in the Budget
The political noise this month was revealing, mostly because it felt slightly detached from how pubs and bars are actually trading. Multiple operators pushed back on government talk of later opening hours. Loungers chairman Alex Reilley called the late-night pub plans a “complete waste of time”. Inda Pubs chair Clive Watson went further, calling it “total nonsense” on the basis it increases staffing costs when many venues are already pulling hours back.
At the same time, UKHospitality warned that 500 large high street outlets are at risk of closure due to a planned business rates surcharge hitting properties over £500,000 rateable value. That’s a very specific cliff edge, and it lands on exactly the venues that anchor town centres: big pubs, big restaurants, big leisure boxes. If those sites start going dark, everyone nearby loses foot traffic.
In other words, October’s regulatory thread was not about serving an extra round at 1am. It was about whether the cost base makes sense to keep the doors open at 11am.
The common thread across all of this is that capital is flowing to operators who can scale, standardise and keep a grip on guest feedback, while weak estates get forced into fast decisions. When confidence is low and costs are rising, the market doesn’t reward “fine, on average”. It rewards brands that can deliver the same experience on a wet Wednesday in Leeds as they do on a Saturday night in London.
Where measurement matters
When brands are buying 216 sites in one go, refinancing to convert 12 locations, or trying to rebuild after administration, the fastest way to waste money is guessing which venues are slipping and why. A structured programme of Mystery Customer Visits shows whether speed, cleanliness, upsell and brand standards are holding up across regions, not just in the flagship sites senior teams visit. Pair that with Online Reviews Monitoring and you can see, week by week, whether customer satisfaction is being dragged down by order accuracy, team attitude, or simple maintenance issues that spiral into reputational damage.
November’s Budget will sharpen all of these bets, and Christmas trading will quickly expose who has built something repeatable versus who is relying on heroics. If you’d like a sample report or a quick chat about what’s possible, get in touch.