Where Is Papa John's Controversial Founder John Schnatter Today?

In the '90s, you could find John Schnatter in TV commercials, imploring you to order a Papa Johns pizza (and you'd see it again on the box when you ordered said pizza). Today, you'll find him reacting to pizza videos on social media or making guest appearances on podcasts. But there's one place you won't find John Schnatter, former CEO of Papa Johns: actually running the pizza delivery business he founded.

Papa Johns and its founder were once firmly entwined, but the two are now completely separate entities. The Papa Johns website doesn't even mention the founder who bestowed the company with his name. Amid backlash to recent comments, Schnatter resigned as CEO before also stepping down as chairman in 2018. He's since sold off over $500 million of stock in the company, with the main connection between the two parties being Schnatter's first name.

That's not to say Schnatter has totally left the limelight. Since exiting the company he founded, he's shown up in magazines, on podcasts, and all over social media to tell his version of events. His story has evolved over the years, and he's grown more open about his political views. Here's what we found about the story of Papa Johns' famous founder and what he's up to today.

John Schnatter began selling pizzas in 1984, taking a sledgehammer to a broom closet in the back of his father's bar to make enough room for his pizza equipment. His dedication to his business led him to sell his treasured Chevy Camaro to keep things running. The pizza was so good and Schnatter so focused that Papa Johns had 16 locations and $2 million in sales in the Louisville area after just four years. In 1989, Papa Johns won Louisville Magazine's award for Best Pizza, a win Schnatter credited with spurring the next phase of his company's explosive growth.

Papa Johns went public in 1993, with the ticker symbol PZZA on NASDAQ. By 1994, Papa Johns had 500 stores in the U.S. By 1999, there were 2,000 locations, including the first international store in Mexico City. Throughout the next decade, Papa Johns would expand internationally, pioneer online restaurant sales, and partner with major sports leagues.

Over the course of the '90s, Schnatter also began appearing more prominently in Papa Johns TV commercials, making Papa John the founder and Papa Johns the company one and the same. In early spots, Schnatter attributed his use of fresh ingredients to his grandfather's inspiration, but the commercials soon became more aggressive. Papa Johns would mention its competitors by name, claiming its high-quality ingredients were the reason it was scooping up market share from other quick-service or fast food pizza chains like Domino's or Pizza Hut.

Papa Johns' confrontational TV commercials soon drew the wrath of Pizza Hut. When the Pizza Hut founders, the Carney brothers, sold their company to PepsiCo and Frank Carney opened Papa Johns franchises, the upstart pizza company crafted a TV spot showing the Carney choosing Papa Johns because it was apparently better pizza. Pizza Hut couldn't dispute that its founders had indeed opened Papa Johns' franchises. Instead, it disputed Papa Johns' slogan, which promoted the use of better ingredients.

Pizza Hut sued Papa Johns over this tagline on the grounds of false advertising and misleading claims about its ingredients. Papa Johns made a big deal of its fresh and high-quality ingredients, but Pizza Hut challenged that this was actually the case. Pizza Hut won the initial court case, with a federal court ruling that Papa Johns had to stop using the slogan. Schnatter has never been one to go down without a fight, however, and appealed the decision. Papa Johns won the appeal, keeping its slogan and the $12.5 million it had been ordered to pay in damages.

Papa Johns' impressive growth in the 1990s couldn't sustain itself into the 2000s, and sales and store openings stagnated as the pizza chain moved into the new millennium. After several years of decline, Schnatter agreed to step down as CEO in an effort to regain momentum for the company. He remained chairman of the board, and Papa Johns hired Nigel Travis, a former executive from Blockbuster, to take the top role in 2005.

Though Schnatter seemed amenable to giving up his CEO role at first, the situation quickly grew contentious. He was required to have more distance from the day-to-day operations of Papa Johns, but still tried to exert as much influence as possible from his position on the board, just as he would when he exited as CEO for a second time in 2018. Schnatter made his own plans for budgets – which he claimed were usually more accurate — and intervened in a franchise deal, and Travis left to join Dunkin' after just three years, leaving Schnatter to once again slide into the seat of CEO.

Relishing his return to the helm of his beloved company, John Schnatter made a big splash in the press. He launched a nationwide search for the Camaro he'd sold to keep his father's tavern open and fund his fledgling pizza business, offering a $250,000 reward to whoever found it. When he found it in 2009, Schnatter offered free pizza to anyone who owned a Camaro in celebration. He kept finding new ways to market the brand, and in 2010, Papa Johns became the official pizza sponsor of the NFL.

While Schnatter was working on bringing back the flashy image of his '90s TV commercials, he was also making major moves behind the scenes. Over the course of a few years, he put his friends into powerful positions at the company, where he was accused of creating a "bro culture" (via Forbes). One of these friends was Tim O'Hern, an old schoolmate who had previously been asked to leave the company amid accusations that he had mistreated employees. Some also questioned whether Schnatter's new employees had the right qualifications for their roles.

Around the same time that John Schnatter was settling back into being the face of Papa Johns, he increasingly expresed his personal views in the form of political donations. He had made small donations to congressional candidates as far back as 1996, but took it a few steps further in 2012 when he hosted a private fundraiser for then-presidential candidate Mitt Romney and donated more than $30,000 to the Republican National Committee. That same year, Schnatter drew ire in the media when he claimed the Affordable Care Act would cause Papa Johns to raise prices and cut employee hours. He later softened those statements, but it wouldn't be the last time Schnatter spoke out on political issues.

Schnatter expanded his philanthropic efforts through other donations and appearances at celebrity fundraisers. A longtime supporter of higher education, in 2015, the John H. Schnatter Family Foundation donated $6 million to the University of Kentucky to establish a research institute in his name within the Gatton College of Business and Economics. In the 2016 election cycle, he also pledged $100,000 across three separate donations to Mike Pence.

By 2017, Papa Johns was back on top of the pizza delivery game. Online ordering and sales were soaring. The company was the official pizza of Major League Baseball and the National Football League, and had further advertising deals with more than 20 individual teams. But it was the NFL deal, the cornerstone of Papa Johns' brand recognition, that would spark one of Schnatter's biggest public controversies.

During a quarterly conference call, Schnatter claimed that Papa Johns had been "hurt" by the NFL's handling of the protests in which football players knelt during the national anthem to bring attention to police brutality (via NPR). The company said the NFL should find a better resolution to the ongoing protests and removed the NFL shield or its official sponsor designation from advertisements in response. "Leadership starts at the top, and this is an example of poor leadership," Schnatter said.

Though he didn't clarify specifically what the NFL's resolution should entail, Schnatter faced an online firestorm over his comments. Papa Johns' stock price dropped more than 10% in less than two weeks. Schnatter apologized and, in December, Papa Johns announced that he had stepped down as CEO. In a final blow, Pizza Hut was named the new official pizza of the NFL in February 2018.

John Schnatter remained chairman of the board of Papa Johns, just like the first time he stepped down as CEO. However, it wasn't long before he faced more backlash. Hoping to avoid another PR disaster like Schnatter's NFL comments, Papa Johns arranged a media training exercise with external marketing agency Laundry Service. During a training call, Schnatter was asked how he would put distance between himself and racist groups on the internet. In response, Schnatter claimed that KFC's Colonel Sanders used a racial slur without repercussions. In explaining as much, Schnatter reportedly used the N-word.

When details of the training call came to light, things fell apart quickly for Schnatter. He soon issued an apology, stating, "Regardless of the context, I apologize. Simply stated, racism has no place in our society" (via Forbes). But the damage was already done. Papa Johns lost nearly $100 million in stock value the day the call was reported, and Major League Baseball halted its collaborative Papa Slam promotion.

Stock prices rebounded when Schnatter resigned as chairman of the board, but more longtime partners continued to cut ties, with both the University of Louisville and the University of Kentucky removing all mention of Schnatter and Papa Johns from school grounds. Within a week, Schnatter told local news station WLKY that Laundry Service had tried to extort Papa Johns before selling the story to Forbes, as well as insisting, "I don't condone racism in any way." By this time, the agency had already ended its contract with Papa Johns.

Once John Schnatter was out as both chairman and CEO, his relationship with the company he founded quickly soured. The company removed his face from branding, evicted him from his subleased office space, and asked him to stop talking about the business. Less than a month after details of his controversial conference call were published, Schnatter sued Papa Johns for access to company documents and began claiming that he was pressured into resigning. The Papa Johns board moved quickly to prevent Schnatter from acquiring more shares and thus taking back control of the company. It adopted a poison pill strategy, usually employed against activist investors, to prevent Schnatter from buying his way back in.

The lawsuit lasted a few months, until Schnatter and Papa Johns negotiated a complicated settlement. Papa Johns would halt part of its poison pill strategy and allow Schnatter to have a say in the new board member who would take his place. In return, Schnatter had to withdraw the lawsuit about company documents and a second dispute he'd filed over property. He also agreed to scrap his plan to run for a board seat in 2019. At this point, he still owned 31% of the company's shares, but otherwise, John Schnatter was out of Papa Johns for good.

After 35 years of being Papa John, Schnatter found himself shut out of his pizza company and worked to rebuild his public image. By September 2019, he had sold off more than $200 million in shares and announced a $1 million donation to Simmons College, a private, historically black college in Kentucky. While some saw this as a shrewd PR move in the wake of the N-word controversy, Schnatter emphasized that the gift was about supporting the community. He also donated $500,000 to his high school to upgrade its baseball field.

But Schnatter's resurrected philanthropic reputation was short-lived. In November 2019, he sat down for a local TV interview full of bold statements that made the interview go viral. In the interview, Schnatter claimed he knew that Papa Johns quality was declining because he had eaten 40 pizzas in 30 days. He also vowed that "the day of reckoning will come" for the pizza company (via WDRB). (Later, Schnatter clarified that he was sampling pizzas for quality control purposes; he hadn't eaten 40 entire pizzas.)

While memes of his interview still circulated, Schnatter sued the agency that conducted his infamous training call, alleging the violation of a nondisclosure agreement. "The facts will show that my words were taken out of context and used to manufacture a scandal against me based on a completely false narrative," Schnatter said (via CNBC).

Despite the memeification of his now-infamous interview, John Schnatter didn't stop telling his version of his exit from Papa Johns, working hard to dispel a negative public perception. In 2021, Schnatter met with a former Papa Johns employee who had sued for discrimination after his manager made racial comments, and vehemently sided with the employee in the press.

Around the same time, Schnatter was increasing his political efforts, donating to and meeting with many Republican politicians, including Donald Trump. Schnatter built a bigger social media following during this time, gaining hundreds of thousands of followers on TikTok and Instagram. In 2024, he rejoined X after 10 years off the platform. He has continued to cash out shares and claim that Papa Johns is losing customers without the conservative values that helped build the business.

At the same time, the company has continued to distance itself from its founder. Papa Johns invited Shaquille O'Neal to the board of directors, and the basketball star appeared in commercials as the pizza chain tried to rehab its image after Schnatter's controversial comments. Perhaps one of the biggest blows to Schnatter, however, was when Papa Johns removed the apostrophe from its logo. Some speculated the grammatical change was intended to show that Schnatter no longer possessed control of the company.

Nowadays, John Schnatter continues to tell his version of the Papa Johns story. However, as business entities, the two have entirely severed ties. Not only does Papa Johns not mention Schnatter as a founder by name in its account of the company history, but Schnatter's personal timeline skims over the circumstances around his exit.

But Schnatter hasn't let Papa Johns go that easily. He still talks about his exit from the pizza chain, and his social media handle on nearly every platform is some version of Papa John Schnatter. The Papa Johns founder has continued to make public appearances and political contributions. He frequently expresses his support for politicians like Donald Trump, who he has praised for restoring his freedom of speech, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and makes regular donations to state and federal campaigns. In May 2025, he appeared on an episode of the podcast "Erased!", which tells the stories of canceled public figures.

When he isn't reacting to pizza videos, you can also find Schnatter sharing updates on social media from his travels and daily family life. Schnatter seems to have found his place in his post-Papa Johns life, but we're still watching to see what he does next.