Inside Popeyes University: How the restaurant chain is building its future leaders

When Popeyes opened its first UK restaurant in 2021, the Louisiana-born chicken brand was a newcomer in a crowded quick-service restaurant (QSR) market. Five years later, it has nearly 130 UK restaurants and is opening sites at considerable pace.

Its progress as an employer has also received national recognition. In May, Popeyes UK was named among The Sunday Times Best Places to Work 2026 for the second year running, as well as being highly commended in the list’s ethnic minorities category.

But rapid expansion creates a particular people challenge. Every restaurant needs colleagues who understand the operation, managers who can lead under pressure and senior leaders capable of carrying a young company’s culture into new locations. If that talent cannot be developed quickly enough from within, each opening increases the business’s reliance on external recruitment.

Matt Hudson

Chief People Officer, Popeyes UK

Matt Hudson has watched that challenge grow in real time. He joined Popeyes UK as its first Chief People Officer nearly three years ago, when the business had around 30 restaurants. His remit now spans the entire employee experience, from recruitment, reward and talent management to employee relations, benefits and organisational design.

Hudson previously spent five years at Wagamama and also held roles at Travelodge, having begun his career in the nuclear energy sector.

The opportunity to shape a young, ambitious business was a rare draw.

“In your career, you don’t get a huge amount of opportunities to go somewhere that is so new, that has also got such big ambitions,” he says. “That was the big thing for me. I had the opportunity of growing the business, but it was the brand itself as well. It’s energetic, it’s vibrant. (It’s) something that we really pride ourselves on.”

That growth has now made developing people internally a business necessity. Popeyes University’s task is to give the company the infrastructure to do it.

Creating an L&D playbook from scratch

Popeyes may have operated in the US since 1972 - boasting around 3,000 restaurants in the states - but its UK business could not simply lift a ready-made development model from elsewhere in the global network. As a major franchise operation, the local team needed to define what learning and career progression should look like for its own workforce.

Hudson explains, “With us being a massive franchise, we didn’t have a learning & development playbook to use, so we created our own completely from scratch.”

Developed over several years, Popeyes University houses the company’s operational training, leadership development, career pathways, apprenticeships and wider learning. It covers practical restaurant skills alongside areas including diversity, equity and inclusion and neurodiversity.

The commercial case is straightforward - Popeyes is opening dozens of restaurants every year in the UK. A new site must initially be staffed from outside the company because it has no existing team or succession plan within that location. Hudson wants that balance to shift as the organisation matures.