Food Theory: STOP Ordering Your Pizza Like This!

Are you the guy who ordered a dozen

pizza

s? That's me, um, just so you know I'm not going to eat them all by myself. Surely not, I really need them for science. Okay, clearly you don't believe me, so let me explain. I'm a youtuber and I need these

pizza

s for an experiment, tip me 18, no one needs to hear about

this

, how about 20? Hello Internet, welcome to Food Theory, the show that offers

food

for thought with additional cheese theorists, here's the deal I've eaten a lot of pizza

this

year and I mean a lot, in fact I've probably eaten the most pizza in 2020 than in any other year of my life and that includes the second year of university, which is an achievement now, I'm sure. that we have all seen our eating habits altered to some extent thanks in large part to the pandemic;

In my case,

ordering

pizza has been a safe, easy, and cost-effective way to feed my family of three in a pinch, but because we've been

ordering

so frequently that the profitability of it all has suddenly become an issue. top priority. Now let me say this from the top: this episode is not about the finer, more subjective aspects of pizza, so all you Italian New York and Chicago pizza purists. We'll hear their arguments in a future episode, today it's about who can deliver delicious pizza to my door and into my stomach at the best price. We're talking about the big guys, the multinational pizza chains that deliver pizza to the largest number of customers regardless.

Where in the world you're watching this episode, there's a good chance you're familiar with at least one of the world's four largest pizza chains, Domino's Pizza Hut, Little Caesars, and Papa John's. Now I'll be the first to admit that I definitely prefer. pizzas from certain companies on this list over others, but at the same time I'm not here to argue against the palette of the world. These four companies have managed to strike a chord with customers around the world, so today

food

theory

focuses on a more measurable and objective metric value that's right, let's find out who delivers the pizza that is objectively the best bang for

your

buck we've done it with fast food fries we've done it with fast food soda and today food

theory

is doing it with pizza chains so sit back and enjoy a slice theorists today We will show the consumer which cake takes the cake.

As far as I'm concerned there are a few main categories that need to be addressed, the first is how much pizza I'm buying for my dollar I want to know how many grams of pizza my dollar is buying as I see it, if I'm going to spend my hard earned money hard to win on a pizza, I better fill up, look if I wanted to eat food that's really just air, I'd go buy some cotton candy, but if I want to feel like there's a giant rock rolling around in my gut, that means It's pizza time honey, I also want to focus on the ingredients, we definitely have to judge.

These pizza chains depending on their ingredients are generous with the quantities or charge more compared to other restaurants. It's important that we compare similarly sized pizzas and it turns out that all four of our pizza chains offer a 14-inch option, so to keep things fair we only order 14-inch pizzas across the board, we also stick with Standard pizza from each restaurant, that is, no deep dishes, no thin crusts, no fancy things in the case of the dominoes and pizza hut, which were 14 inches in size. hand-made for Little Caesars, it was the 14-inch round pizza and at Papa John's we went with the large 14-inch original crust.

We assigned this experiment to food theory field researcher Amy, who you may remember as the Tootsie Pop champ and our chuck e. Amy, the cheese dance rebel, ordered the same three pies from each restaurant, a cheese pizza, a pepperoni pizza and a pizza with extra pepperoni, why these three guys, you ask right, the cheese pizza gave us a basis for the weight and price of each restaurant's 14-inch pizza. The pepperoni pizza gave us an idea of ​​how much topping each pizza chain will add, as well as how much each chain will charge for a single topping.

Finally, the extra pepperoni pizzas not only gave us some additional insight into the generosity of the toppings, but also gave us a look at what each pizza chain interprets as an extra topping. It's true that pepperonis aren't the only topping out there, but it was a good variable to isolate because all four chains offered it using a kitchen scale. Amy weighed the 12 individual pizzas and then meticulously plucked them. We removed all the pepperonis and weighed them separately. Finally, we recorded the takeout price of each pizza. We debated including delivery fees in the price, but certain restaurants had flat delivery fees and others changed the amount based on the distance they had to deliver to remove. that as a variable we simply opted for a flat rate pizza, no deals, no coupons, no additional fees, so with all the raw data in hand, it was time to crunch the numbers immediately before even doing any calculations , a disturbing trend stood out in almost all pepperoni pizzas. it weighed less than that restaurant's cheese pizza and the extra pepperoni also weighed less, sometimes it even weighed less than the regular pepperoni toppings and not just a little less, I'm talking a lot, a little less, look at these numbers dominoes cheese 736 grams pepperoni 695 grams of extra pepperoni 706 cheese pizza papa john's 885 grams of pepperoni 820 grams of extra pepperoni even less at 798 grams the same at pizza hut, I mean, it's a big difference, I think it's fair to say that when you order a pizza at any of these chains, The assumption is that the cheese pizza is the base you are getting and that by adding toppings we get all the cheese plus the meat or vegetables you ordered, as such the pizza should get heavier the more ingredients are added, but they are not.

It doesn't seem to be the case, somehow the pizza as a whole becomes significantly lighter once the toppings are added, which means these restaurants are removing the cheese intentionally or not, perhaps this is a cost saving measure. costs by the restaurant. but honestly, I think it really comes down to the employees. My best guess as to why this might be is that if you buy a cheese pizza there is nowhere to hide, the employee feels pressured to make sure the entire pie is covered with the topping so you can sprinkle a few extra handfuls of cheese, while the toppings actually cover up a lot of sins and marinara sauce holes peek out, which would explain why at 50 of the restaurants the extra pepperoni pizzas ended up being the lightest of the three, which is, you know, Everything The opposite of what I would have expected anyway, it was a big reveal and if you have any theories of

your

own or have worked in a pizzeria and know what's really going on here, please leave a comment below.

I love your thoughts on what's really going on here. You'll also notice that there was one chain that didn't have this problem and that was Little Caesar's. Theirs was the only pepperoni pizza of all the ones we tried that actually weighed more than the cheese. So lesson number one coming out of this episode, when you order a pizza with toppings, you don't get a cheese pizza plus whatever is on top, as you add toppings the amount of cheese decreases accordingly. Next, I was curious to know which pizzas weighed the most per unit cost by dividing the weight of the three pizzas by the cost of the three pizzas, we were able to determine the grams of pizza per dollar for each restaurant in this category, the good guy, the little guy César was once again the big winner with an average of 106 grams of pizza. pizza per dollar spent no other restaurant was even close second place was papa john's with 56.6 almost half of little caesar's total and that was second place pizza hut actually came last in this category with just 42.6 grams of pizza per dollar The individual pizza that was the most cost-optimized was the Little Caesars pepperoni, at 131.7 grams per dollar.

Pizza Hut's Extra Pepperoni, on the other hand, at just 35.5 grams of pizza per dollar, was the lowest ranked of all the tests, so at this point something is already becoming crystal clear. Little Caesars pizzas have about the same amount of food as their competitors, but for some reason their prices are much lower. I mean, I'm talking about half the price that Little Caesars pepperoni pizza, for example, cost us five dollars and 55 cents over and over again. this is flat rate for pizza, no coupons, no deals, no good, every other pepperoni pizza we bought cost us over 14 dollars, so how does Little Caesars do this?

What are they doing differently that allows them to sell the same amount? of food for half the price. Is it really that the quality of the pizza is much lower? Well, it actually turns out that there are a few reasons why Little Caesars is a much more streamlined operation than the other pizza chains in the experiment. Because Little Caesars doesn't offer dinan to their customers, they actually save a lot of money on overhead. They don't have to rent as many square meters. They don't have to hire waiters. They don't need to have a ton of dishes, cutlery and sinks to wash it, all of which influences the cost.

They also do the absolute minimum when it comes to delivery for the last 20 years. They have not had delivery as an option. This year was the first year it brought it back and even then it was primarily through third-party apps like Doordash, so Little Caesars is outsourcing its delivery while competitors are shelling out money to hire in-house delivery drivers, another reason prices Little Caesar's are so low and this is what you would expect is the cost of the ingredients, for example, Little Caesars mixes less expensive monster cheese with their mozzarella cheese and competitors don't, so that will save them, but here's what really surprised me, perhaps the most important reason that Little Caesars can sell their pizza for less is the fact that they are not completely in the pizza game, they are in the food delivery game .

If you saw our food theory above and how McDonald's is actually a real estate company, you'll understand how a restaurant can keep its prices ridiculously high. low by making real money in a connected industry in the case of McDonald's they entered the real estate game as a way to earn rent from their franchises in the case of little Caesar's they saw an opportunity for expansion in the food distribution industry back in the early days In the 1970s, like any restaurant, Little Caesars had to deal with the problem of how to get ingredients and products to their various locations, so they developed an internal distribution network, but they soon realized that the distribution game The food service game was perhaps more lucrative than the pizza game, so little caesars took the distribution network and spun it off into a new company today known as blue line food service distribution that ships ingredients and other products to little caesars, as well as many other companies outside the little caesars family from blue line and little caesars.

They are both owned by the same parent company, their distribution costs are heavily subsidized and that helps keep their prices ridiculously low. and Pizza Hut do, but while their pizza may be cheaper doesn't necessarily mean it's objectively better and we haven't talked about the ingredients yet, so let's dive into those results. We've already discussed how adding ingredients loses the cheese, so that's a fact. across the board, but beyond that, I wanted to know who's racking them up and who's holding them back. After all, if I just wanted to eat a bunch of bread with a little bit of stuff sprinkled on it, I would have just ordered the crazy bread, so calculated the percentage of ingredients by weight for each of the pepperoni and extra pepperoni pizzas by dividing the weight of the isolated pepperonis by the weight of the entire pizza.

This tells us the total weight of the pizza, how much of that weight comes from the ingredients. I'm paying a premium for the extra stuff on top. I want to make sure I get a lot of that extra stuff. The restaurant with the best overall percentage of ingredients was Pizza Hut, whose pepperonis accounted for an average of 17.5 of the total weight. Little Caesars at just 7.9 percent had the lowest ingredient percentage of all restaurants. Now, if you love pepperoni with all your heart, then Pizza Hut's extra pepperoni pizza is the one for you, it had the highest topping percentage of all the individual pizzas at almost 20 percent.

By contrast, the Little Caesars pepperoni pizza had the lowest topping percentage at just 6.2 percent toppings. It seems like it's another place where Little Caesars is cutting costs, butYou can't really hate him for it because, well, they don't charge you for it. I understand why we look at our final category: grams of dressing per dollar. Here we take the weight of the isolated pepperonis and divide it by the additional cost the customer pays to upgrade. This gives us an idea of ​​which restaurants are overcharging for ingredients and looking at the graph, it is certainly not Domino's that had the most grams of ingredients per dollar with 42.2 Papa John's was the worst value in this category with only 29.9 grams of ingredients per dollar, but what I really want to talk about here is Little Caesars once again, whose grams of dressing per dollar broke the math.

Little Caesars is charging the same amount for their cheese pizza as they do for their pepperoni pizza, that means they are adding pepperonis for zero dollars. That's right, they're giving away the pepperonis. and it can't be divided by zero, folks, which makes your score in this category defy all mathematics. Honestly, it's pretty obvious that Little Caesar's toppings are less and lower quality than the other three. Little Caesars restaurants like pepperonis are thinner, crumbly, don't have that oily texture you'd expect from a pepperoni, like I said before, definitely They're skimping on the number listed on the pizza, but there's no denying it.

When it comes to pure dollars and cents, if you want something that's technically a pepperoni pizza, it's clearly the best value with a price of zero, so here we go, theorists, it's time to announce our overall winners and losers in the category of cheese, the little Caesars. The 14-inch round cheese pizza gives you the best value, Papa John's cheese pizza takes second place, Domino's takes third place and Pizza Hut is rounding up the rear now, how about the best value pepperoni pizzas after counting the scores for each pizza in each category? Caesars is back in first place, but obviously with the caveat that there are lower quality pepperonis and less quantity in the pie if you are looking for a higher quality pepperoni pizza.

Well, Domino's offers the second best value, Pizza Hut comes in third, and Papa John's comes in fourth. The best value for a pizza with extra pepperoni is Dominoes by a wide margin, Papa John's and Pizza Hut tie for second and Little Caesars is last because, again, they don't care much about the ingredients, which Which means now it's time for the big one, the granddaddy of them all, when you add up all the scores, the pizza chain that objectively offers the best value for all of their pizzas is Dominoes, which is honestly a little surprising. because a few minutes ago it seemed like little Caesar had this thing. in the bag, the reason they fell so far in the final ranking is the ingredients, if you just want a cheese pizza or if you want a pepperoni pizza, but you don't care too much about the quantity or quality of the ingredients, then Little Caesars is the clear winner without a doubt, but because two of our categories took into account the total amount of topping you get for both the price and the weight of the pizza, their overall scores suffered, meaning that at In the end, little Caesar has to settle for a third party.

Domino's in the places ranking thanks to its strong toppings game is the overall pizza chain champion, with Pizza Hut in second place and Papa John's in last place, offering neither value nor ingredients, so with all our results finally available, there is one last thing to do. as long as you like pizzas with all the pepperoni chosen at the pizza party at Amy's, but hey, that's just a theory, a food theory, bon appetit, thanks for watching the food theorists. If you liked this episode, you'll love our other value optimization episodes, like ours. Recent theory on how to get the best possible deal on fast food fountain drinks.

Be sure to check it out by clicking the link you see on the screen right now, savvy soda shoppers. While you're at it, click that red subscribe button, it costs you nothing my friends. but it saves you everything, maybe not everything, but maybe a couple of dollars on the next pizza you buy.