Pret A Manger has appointed Matthew Bresnahan as CMO, as it looks to refocus on marketing and innovation to help drive forward the company’s growth plans.

Bresnahan joins from Burger King owner Restaurant Brands International. His new role at Pret will include responsibility for global and localised marketing functions, as well as product innovation, loyalty programmes, customer insights, PR, and delivery channels.

The appointment marks a revival of the CMO role for the coffee chain; it has been without a marketing role in the C-suite for three years.

Barnaby Dawe, who oversaw global marketing function, held the role of chief customer officer between 2018 and 2020, while Dan Burdett was chief customer and growth officer from 2020 to 2022.

Pret A Manger scraps ‘too good to be true’ free coffee subscription

According to its most recent financial report, Pret recorded an operating loss of £451.5m for 2024 despite a 10% rise in global sales to £1.2bn. It identified driving “great value for money” as a key priority for it going forward.

To that end, the brand recently announced the launch of a meal deal. The £7 ‘Pret Deal’ was introduced last week and will be trialled until the year’s end.

The move, which will see it go head-to-head with the supermarkets and others in the lunchtime meal deal market, is part of Pret’s attempt, as it puts it, to “double down” on value.

This is not the first time Pret has focused on value to drive more customers through its doors. Post-pandemic, it introduced Club Pret, a subscription model that offered customers up to five barista-made drinks a day for a set monthly fee.

The brand credited the scheme with helping it return to growth post-pandemic. It also received praise for the way it handled its communications around a price increase of this scheme, with the comms awarded Marketing Week readers’ Campaign of the Year in 2022.

Pret to introduce meal deals as chain doubles down on value

However, by mid-2024, the business scrapped the offering, stating the free coffee scheme had been almost “too good to be true”. It said that it was “time to rethink” the offer, changing the deal to offer a discount of 50% on five drinks a day for £10 per month, before dropping the price to £5.

Value will surely be a priority for Bresnahan as he takes on the new role. CEO Pano Christou praised his track record in “building global food brands and a strong track record of driving growth”.

Bresnahan previously worked at Restaurant Brands International and oversaw a number of brands, including Tim Hortons and Burger King. He spent 12 years at the company with several senior roles such as vice-president of virtual brands and vice-president of global digital marketing, analytics, and guest insights at Burger King.