Case Study: Papa John's achieves 3X faster time to market with Kong

Papa John’s Accelerates Time to Market 3X with Kong

Papa John’s, the global pizza chain with more than 5,300 locations, faced slow feature launches and heavy partner-specific custom development that delayed integrations with digital channels and third‑party aggregators. The Commerce Platform Team was bottlenecked by CI/CD and deployment complexities, inconsistent policy management, and redundant coding—so Papa John’s adopted Kong Enterprise (service connectivity platform, developer portal, and Kubernetes ingress) to standardize and accelerate their API strategy.

Deployed in a hybrid on‑prem/GCP environment with Kong Ingress Controller, CI/CD integration, and a developer portal, Kong centralized API management, reduced custom code and operational overhead, and let teams deploy independently. The implementation put the Commerce Platform Team at the center of integrations and accelerated time to market for new services by 3X, supported over 70% of sales from digital channels, and contributed to the company’s strongest month of overall sales and new customer growth in its 35‑year history.

Papa John’s

Nicholaus Lawson

Solutions Architect