Americans eat an average of 46 slices of pizza a year. The USDA claims that 13% of Americans eat pizza every day. The Washington Post reports that people in the United States eat 100 acres of pizza per day, although that is an extremely odd measurement.
Several of the largest fast-food companies in the country are pizza chains. Pizza Hut ranks sixth in locations, with 18,700. That puts it behind Subway, McDonald’s, Starbucks, KFC and Burger King. Domino’s ranks seventh, with just over 17,000 locations. Two large public companies are in the pizza retail business. They are Domino’s and Papa John’s, which have market values of about $19 billion and more than $4 billion, respectively.
24/7 Tempo has identified the U.S. city with the most expensive pizza. The information is drawn from the Pizza Index 2021, published by the financial advisory site Expensivity, which considered the comparative prices of a cheese pizza in 259 cities around the country based on information from MenuWithPrice.
Expensivity considered any offering described as “plain pizza,” “cheese pizza” or “Margherita pizza” but did not differentiate between pies of different sizes. So the averages given reflect the prices of qualifying pizzas of all sizes.
If you have a craving for pizza and are on a budget, you will be lucky if you are anywhere near Wilmington, North Carolina, or Hayward, California, as the pizzas in both places come in at a very reasonable average of $6.35 each. These cities have the least expensive pizza in America.
In identifying the city with the least expensive pizza, 24/7 Tempo reviewed the average price of a plain pizza for the 259 cities. The price of a pepperoni pizza also came from the Pizza Index, and the number of pizzerias was derived from the Yelp API. Total population used to adjust for pizzerias per 100K population was from the U.S. Census Bureau.
Click here to see all the cities with the least expensive pizza.