Business View Magazine
3
When Nelson Lange started his company back on July
20th of 1995 in Kingston, a little college town outside
Toronto, Ontario, he predicted success. But he was ac-
tually way off the mark. In a good way:
I’ve told this story probably a thousand times. I was
dating my girlfriend, who is now my wife of fifteen years
and we have four little girls together…I bragged to her
and said that in the next ten years I was going to have
ten stores. I was going to open one store a year…after
seven years we had opened up 200 stores.
Lange mentions how the growth didn’t take much fig-
uring out. After the success of his initial venture he
took the next logical route. “What happened was it
worked in the college towns,” Lange says. “We opened
up in Queen’s University and so it wasn’t a big thought
process: ‘Well, let’s open in another college town.’ So
we opened in Peterborough, then up in Ottawa, then
St. Catherine’s and Welland.” Sure enough, the train
kept rolling.
After testing the waters in some border towns just
south of Ontario, Lange says the perception began to
change. “I think that as the brand matured, it got to a
point where people were saying ‘I’d really like to get
Pita Pit in Chicago, where I’m working now. I used to
eat it when I was in college and I miss it.” So the com-
pany took to the Walmarts and Costcos that would be
busy all-year round, maximizing on the interest that
they had been lacking during the college summer
drought. The expansion paid out in spades. Now with
over 500 stores globally to their name, operating in
around 13 countries, Pita Pit’s new headquarters is
Coeur d’Alene, Idaho and they erect about 100 new
stores a year. “It took us 19 years to get to 500 and
it’ll only take another four and a half to get to 1000,”
Lange laughs.
Pita Pit doesn’t just cater to the college crowd any-
more, but it hasn’t forgotten that ethos either. Lange
talks of his stepfather who’s 65 and enjoys grabbing a
pita as he goes from one meeting to the next, but the
