Almost everyone likes to eat pizza, right? That makes the pizza wars among national chains like Domino’s, Pizza Hut, Papa John’s and others intense.
While everybody has their favorite pie purveyor, who is the real winner when it comes to capturing market share?
Food industry trade publication Nation’s Restaurant News (NRN) is out with new authoritative data on sales to answer that question.
Read more: Costco’s $1.50 hot dog gets a new friend — a mammoth cheeseburger!
New pizza king to be crowned soon?
Culling through NRN’s Top 100 report, it looks like there’s going to be a new pizza king crowned sometime later this year!
Pizza Hut is the current leader and longtime incumbent. But it’s seeing slowing growth. The $5.8 billion in U.S. sales that Pizza Hut did in 2016 is down nine-tenths of a percent from the prior year.
At the same time, #2 contender Domino’s took home a $5.3 billion slice of the sales pie in 2016, which was up 11% from 2015.
Industry analysts think this is the year Domino’s likely overtakes Pizza Hut to become the #1 pizza chain in America.
“For 2017, we expect that Domino’s will earn 14.1% market share, surpassing Pizza Hut, which we project will end 2017 with 13.3% market share,” Mark Kalinowski, a Nomura-Instinet analyst, wrote in a May research note.
Pizza Hut is reportedly faltering with digital innovation and missing out on a big chunk of the millennial customer audience that’s responsible for much of our nation’s pizza consumption.
Domino’s, meanwhile, continues appealing to the cheapos among us with a low entry-level price point that’s held steady for seven years and counting. What started as an offer of two medium two-topping pizzas for $5.99 each in 2010 has grown into an offer of any two menu items for $5.99 each nowadays.
Here’s a look at the rest of the best when it comes to ranking U.S. pizza chains by sales:
- Pizza Hut – $5.8 billion in total sales
- Domino’s – $5.3 billion
- Little Caesars Pizza – $3.7 billion
- Papa John’s Pizza – $2.9 billion
- Chuck E. Cheese’s – $885.2 million
- Papa Murphy’s Take ‘N’ Bake Pizza – $884.8 million
- California Pizza Kitchen – $657.4 million
- Marco’s Pizza – $488.9 million
- Cicis – $449.7 million
- Round Table Pizza – $442.6 million
Read more: The 10 fastest-growing chain restaurants
