A Vietnamese restaurant group built around a mission of peace asked what the next decade and a half would commit it to. The answer became a fifteen-year operational roadmap covering energy, water, biodiversity, regenerative agriculture, and the communities the company depends on.
Case study7 min read
In Ho Chi Minh City, in May 2023, six members of Pizza 4P’s leadership team sat down with two consultants from Except for three days of structured argument. They had a slogan, For Peace, that had carried the company since its founders Masuko and Sanae opened the first restaurant in a converted apartment in 2011. They had a growing footprint across Vietnam and a brand recognised across Southeast Asia. What they did not have, twelve years on, was a way of saying what those three words committed them to operationally, fifteen years out.
The question behind the question
The framing question Pizza 4P’s brought to Except sounded straightforward: what steps does a dedicated company take when it strives to deepen its sustainability efforts in the industry? Food and beverage companies ask versions of this question every quarter, and most expect an answer in the form of a programme: switch to certified suppliers, install LED lighting, publish an emissions report. Pizza 4P’s was asking something larger.
The founders had built the business around a philosophy, Delivering Wow, Sharing Happiness, anchored by a single mission: For Peace. After more than a decade of growth, they wanted to know whether those words could survive contact with operational decisions across a national restaurant network, and what it would cost, in money and discipline, to make them survive.
Pizza 4P’s opened its first restaurant in a converted Ho Chi Minh City apartment in 2011. By 2023, the company operated dozens of restaurants across Vietnam, with a supplier network reaching into multiple provinces.
A framework before a programme
Except entered the engagement with its proprietary Symbiosis in Development framework, developed since 1999 and applied across more than six hundred projects worldwide. SiD treats every organization as a node in a wider system of energy flows, material flows, social relationships, and ecological dependencies. The framework asks two questions before any planning begins: which systems does the organization depend on, and which systems depend on the organization? The answers determine the shape of everything that follows.
The project began with training. The Pizza 4P’s leadership team, including CEOs Masuko and Sanae, Sustainability Manager Thu, and CFO Bui Tuong Anh, learned the fundamentals of systemic sustainability and long-horizon roadmapping before any roadmap was attempted. The reasoning was structural. A strategy built around a framework that no one inside the company understands becomes a document the company cannot use, and quietly stops being used.
The core Pizza 4P’s strategy team in Ho Chi Minh City during the May 2023 co-creation workshop.
Three days of systems modelling and commercial stress-testing produced the first draft of a fifteen-year roadmap.
Mapping the dependencies
For several months after the training, Pizza 4P’s and Except collected data together: energy and water consumption across the restaurant network; supplier flows in agriculture, where the company sources cheese, vegetables, and meat across multiple Vietnamese provinces and a small number of international partners; waste streams, employee development pathways, and community relationships in the neighborhoods where the restaurants operate, some of them now in their second decade.
The stakeholder mapping was a separate exercise. Suppliers, employees, customers, regulators, NGO partners, and the wider Vietnamese food industry were positioned on a matrix of influence and dependence, with each group’s interests articulated on their own terms, in their own language. This is one of the harder requirements of the SiD approach. A roadmap that treats stakeholders as audiences ends up serving the marketing department. Treating them as agents pushes the same exercise into strategy, which is where it needs to live.
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The journey towards sustainability is a continuous process of learning, adaptation, and innovation. Pizza 4P’s commitment to this journey, coupled with their willingness to invest in transformative initiatives, exemplifies their leadership in the industry.
The co-creation workshop alternated between systems modelling and commercial reality, with each direction tested against capital constraints and the Vietnamese regulatory environment.
Three days in Ho Chi Minh City
The co-creation workshop ran for three days in May 2023. Present from Pizza 4P’s were Masuko and Sanae, Sustainability Manager Thu, CFO Bui Tuong Anh, and the core strategy team. Present from Except were Director Tom Bosschaert and Vietnam Country Director Chi Nguyen. The agenda alternated between sessions on systems modelling and sessions on commercial reality. Each proposed direction was stress-tested against the company’s capital constraints, the Vietnamese regulatory environment, and the practical limits of supplier development in Southeast Asia.
The workshop produced the first draft of a fifteen-year roadmap. The horizon was chosen deliberately. Five years is short enough that incumbents can wait it out, and ten years is the standard interval for sustainability planning, which is also the standard horizon for being wrong about technology. Fifteen years requires commitments that no current executive will still be in place to defend in person, which is precisely the discipline the founders wanted to impose on themselves and on the people who would inherit the plan.
The engagement in figures
15year strategic horizon set by the roadmap
5operational domains covered, from energy to community
3day co-creation workshop, Ho Chi Minh City, May 2023
25years of Symbiosis in Development methodology informing the work
The shape of the roadmap
The roadmap covers the company’s operations end to end. Energy and water management, with phased targets aligned to the technology curves of the relevant industries on operational timeframes. Biodiversity, integrated through the supply chain and the physical footprint of the restaurants themselves. Regenerative agriculture, sourced through supplier development programmes that build capacity inside the network. Community development, anchored in the neighborhoods where the restaurants already operate.
A central theme runs through all of them. The pursuit of happiness, the founders’ phrase, was embedded as a guiding principle and an operational outcome at the same time. Sustainability work that did not increase the wellbeing of the people inside and around the company was set aside as out of scope. The discipline this creates is unusual. It rules out a category of measures that improve disclosure scores without changing the lived experience of anyone the company employs, serves, or depends on.
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The pursuit of happiness, treated as both a guiding principle and an operational outcome, is what turned For Peace from a slogan on the wall into a way of doing business on a fifteen-year timetable.
From a name to a way of doing business
Strategic outcomes are harder to count than emissions, and the Pizza 4P’s roadmap has not yet been graded against the quantitative metrics that consultancies tend to lead with. The deliverables were architectural. The company has a strengthened core strategy used to enter new development pathways and to communicate intent to employees, partners, and regulators. It has the outline of a long-term implementation plan, with the management cadence to refine it. And it has a working definition of For Peace that lives inside operational decisions on a fifteen-year timetable.
A slogan makes a promise. A roadmap places that promise on a calendar, with people responsible for the dates. The distance between those two positions is the work the company has now begun, and the work the next generation of Pizza 4P’s leadership will inherit when the founders eventually step back from it.
