A pizza parlour, a buyer and a franchise system.

Godfather’s Pizza began in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1973. The International Directory of Company Histories, in its entry on Godfather’s Pizza Incorporated reproduced by FundingUniverse, gives the founding year and city and records that the chain went through a period of rapid growth while it was owned by Diversified Foods Inc.

English Wikipedia names the people at the start. It says Willy Theisen bought the pizza parlour and the Godfather’s name in 1974 from Gregg Johnson, who later started the Minsky’s Pizza restaurants, and that Theisen then began selling franchises. Wikipedia also records that Theisen sold the company to Pillsbury in 1985 and stepped back from running it.

The company directory describes the Pillsbury years from the parent’s side. Pillsbury, the Minneapolis food company, ran Godfather’s as a subsidiary alongside other restaurant businesses it owned at the time, including Burger King, Steak and Ale and Bennigan’s. Wikipedia adds that the Godfather’s headquarters moved to Southern California in 1985 and returned to Omaha within a year; Wikipedia gives Omaha as the headquarters today.

Godfather’s built its following in the middle of the country. The directory lists Omaha, Kansas City, Minneapolis and Salt Lake City among its strongholds by the late 1980s, along with the Seattle area, where the company tested a single telephone number for pizza delivery in 1986. Wikipedia describes the chain’s traditional base today as the Midwestern United States, especially Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota and South Dakota.

The name and the commercials have always played on the same reference. The chain’s spokesman, known simply as “The Godfather”, is a comic parody of a film gangster, and the company’s slogan, quoted by the Lincoln business magazine Strictly Business in 2019, promises “A pizza you can’t refuse!”

Pillsbury, a management buyout and Omaha ownership.

In 1986 Pillsbury appointed Herman Cain, a Pillsbury employee since 1977 who had worked in its Burger King division, as president of Godfather’s, according to the International Directory of Company Histories. The directory says Cain closed loss-making units, added home delivery at many restaurants and introduced new pizzas.

Ownership changed again at the end of the decade. The directory records that Pillsbury, restructuring its restaurant holdings from January 1988, encouraged a leveraged buyout of Godfather’s by a group of senior managers led by Cain and by Ronald B. Gartlan, then executive vice-president and chief operating officer. Wikipedia says the group completed the purchase by the beginning of 1990.

Wikipedia traces the handover that followed: Cain stepped down as chief executive and president in 1996 and Gartlan became chief executive; Cain stayed on as chairman until 2002; and in 2009 Gartlan bought out Cain. In a 2024 statement quoted by CSP Daily News, the company described itself as a family-operated franchise.

The brand has also spread well beyond its own dining rooms. The company told CSP Daily News in February 2024 that it had partnered with convenience-store retailers through an Express programme since 1990, and Wikipedia says that programme led in 2018 to a To Go licensing scheme under which retailers sell pre-topped pizzas. CSP Daily News reported that Alta Convenience was introducing Godfather’s To Go at 21 of its stores in states including Colorado, Kansas and Wyoming, and quoted the company: “All that is required is a freezer, oven and warmer.”

The directory also records experiments with where the name could appear. In the autumn of 1991 the company trialled a supermarket food-court concept called the Supreme Court, placing Godfather’s alongside other restaurant brands inside grocery stores in the Kansas City area and elsewhere; one of the trial sites was later withdrawn, the directory says.

Design and documentation.

A pizza chain’s identity is carried by a handful of everyday objects more than by any single advert: the box that leaves the counter, the sign above the door, the shape of the building itself and, for some names, a character who stands in for the company. Each of these is a surface that the brand reaches customers through, often far from any office where the identity was drawn.

The box is the piece most people handle. It travels home, sits on a table and is printed in large numbers, so its lid tends to carry the name, a colour scheme and sometimes a slogan or illustration. Storefront signs do similar work at street level, in shopping centres and in food courts, where a name and a colour have to be read quickly and from a distance.

Buildings and mascots add a further layer. A distinctive roofline, an interior theme or a costumed figure can become part of how a chain is recognised, and those elements may be kept, revised or dropped as owners change. Each guide that follows records who started the chain, who has owned it over time and how its name, signs and marks have been presented, separating what independent sources report from what the company says about itself.

A spokesman in a white fedora.

The most recognisable part of the Godfather’s identity is a person. The chain’s commercials feature a character called “The Godfather”, and the descriptions of him agree on the costume: Strictly Business wrote in 2019 that he can be identified by his white fedora, pinstripe suit, red tie and the flower on his jacket. Strictly Business called him a parody of Marlon Brando’s Don Vito Corleone from the 1972 film The Godfather; English Wikipedia says his likeness parodies Don Fanucci from The Godfather Part II (1974) and notes the Corleone comparison as well.

Two Omaha actors have played the part, Wikipedia says: initially J. William Koll, and later Dale O’Brien, a professional actor since 1975 who has been the spokesman since about 2000. Strictly Business named O’Brien as the current Godfather in 2019 and described him appearing in person at a franchised restaurant in Lincoln to mark its one-year anniversary, posing for photographs with families. Wikipedia credits him with the catchphrase “do it!” alongside the slogan “a pizza you can’t refuse”.

The company has used other characters as well. The International Directory of Company Histories records that, soon after Cain took over in 1986, Godfather’s hired the New York agency Buckley/DeCerchio, which created a television character called “Spooner Wiggins, Godfather of the Airwaves” — which the directory, quoting Restaurant Business, describes as an irreverent call-in radio host who mixed jokes with plugs for the pizza. The directory says the company followed with a television and print campaign in October 1992 to launch an oversized pizza.

The name also travels on packaging. Describing its To Go programme for convenience stores in 2024, the company told CSP Daily News that “branded packaging and marketing support pieces provide further benefits” to the retailers that sign up.

For a design guide, Godfather’s Pizza shows how a name borrowed from film can be carried by a costumed spokesman rather than a drawn mascot. Compare Little Caesars and Domino’s. For this guide we use Godfather red, pinstripe black and fedora white with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Godfather’s Pizza’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.