Portillo's Inc. chief people officer Jill Waite will exit the Chicago-based fast-casual chain on Nov. 1, the company disclosed in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing — the third senior leadership change this year as CEO Brett Patterson reshapes the executive team around a sales turnaround.

Waite, who joined Portillo's in 2019, will receive severance benefits under the company's existing plan. "Details on the separation agreement will be filed later," Portillo's said in the filing.

What did Waite oversee at Portillo's?

During her tenure, Waite helped build what the company has called an "internal influencer program," a recruiting and brand-awareness initiative that encouraged Portillo's employees to post on social media about their jobs and the brand. Before joining the chain, she held human resources and operations roles at Sephora and 24-Hour Fitness.

For a chain that has leaned on employer brand to staff both company-operated restaurants and franchisee locations across the Midwest, the people-officer seat carries direct weight on hourly turnover — typically a fast-casual operator's largest controllable cost after food and paper.

Why is Portillo's reshuffling executives?

The personnel moves follow a stretch of declining sales that prompted Patterson, who took the CEO role earlier in 2025, to cut roughly 18% of corporate staff at the end of July, along with a number of field managers. The reductions signaled an effort to compress overhead and redirect resources toward same-store sales recovery.

The backdrop is a tough year for chain restaurants broadly. Technomic Top 500 data show chain restaurant sales slowed again in 2025 as consumers cut back on dining, with sectors like coffee, beverages and snacks, and chicken outperforming the rest of the field.

Who else has joined the leadership team?

Two additional senior hires have landed this year:

• Kevin Kalicak joined as chief financial officer in September.
• Christopher Hansen was named executive chef in July.

The combination of a new CFO and a new executive chef alongside the people-officer transition points to simultaneous work on labor cost, food cost and menu execution — the three levers most likely to move restaurant-level margin in the near term.

What is the operator-level math at stake?

Portillo's operates a mix of company-owned and franchised units, with the highest concentration of company-operated restaurants in Illinois. Italian beef, Chicago-style hot dogs, and chocolate cake shakes anchor a menu engineered for high throughput.

The check average benefits from add-on dessert and beverage items, while off-premise and digital ordering have grown as a share of total sales. A leaner corporate structure can free marketing dollars, but it also reduces the bench of support staff who train franchisees and monitor consistency across markets.

What happens next?

Portillo's next investor update should provide the first read on whether the July reductions and the new executive lineup are translating into traffic and margin recovery, or whether further cost actions are likely before the chain's next fiscal year.