Pizza Chains Are Losing Their Slice of the Pie

Pizza isn't going away, it's just not everywhere anymore. The Wall Street Journal reports that the once-dominant pizzeria has slipped behind coffee shops and Mexican restaurants in terms of sheer numbers, with sales growth lagging behind the broader fast-food market for years. Price wars, delivery apps offering endless alternatives, and sticker shock—$20 pizzas competing with $5 fast-food deals—have chipped away at pizza's old advantage as the easiest dinner in town. Bankruptcies at chains like Pieology and Bertucci's, plus declining sales at long-standing brands, have raised a once-unthinkable question: Has the country had enough? As Papa John's CFO Ravi Thanawala put it bluntly, "Pizza is disrupted right now."

The numbers help explain the anxiety. Pizza chains still generated about $31 billion in sales last year, and roughly one in 10 Americans eats pizza on any given day, according to federal estimates cited by the WSJ. But pizza's rank among restaurant chains has fallen to sixth, down from second in the 1990s, and the total number of pizza restaurants has declined since peaking in 2019. Chains are scrambling: Pizza Hut has posted eight straight quarters of same-store sales declines, California Pizza Kitchen sold for far less than it did a decade ago, and Papa John's is reassessing everything from its oven temperatures to franchise strategy. Even loyal customers are getting choosier. "I'd feel silly paying 50% to 100% more anywhere else even if I can afford it," says Austin Rowland, a 26-year-old Domino's customer in Georgia.

But not everyone agrees the pizza era is fading. Industry publication PMQ Pizza argues the WSJ focus on chains misses a quieter shift: independent pizzerias filling the gap. Loren Padelford, chief revenue officer at Slice—a tech platform that serves more than 15,000 indie shops—says orders at independent pizzerias on its network are up about 20% year over year, which suggests momentum is moving away from corporate brands. With chains closing locations and cutting back, Padelford sees opportunity for operators who control their customer data, streamline technology, and focus on loyalty instead of discounts. "The era of the chains is over, and the era of indie pizza is in full swing," he says. "More shops are opening than ever before, and more are staying open. This is the greatest time in the last 100 years to open an independent pizzeria."