FINANCE
QUICK-SERVICE PIZZA SALES TURNED NEGATIVE LAST YEAR
The overall industry’s sales cooled to 3%, marking the fourth consecutive year of deceleration, but pizza was the only category in the red.
BY ALICIA KELSO
Q uick-service pizza sales have been coming back down to earth since the category’s pandemic highs. In 2025, however, the category slipped below the surface, registering a 0.3% year-over-year sales slide following a nominal gain of just 0.6% in 2024 and an increase of 2.8% in 2023, according to the Technomic Top 500 Chain Restaurant Report. Unit count has followed a similar trajectory, with just a 0.1% gain last year, following 0.6% in 2024 and 1.1% in 2023. Like much of the industry, the quick- service pizza category’s performance has been all over the map — some big winners, some major laggards and plenty of in-betweens. That said, in 2025, the category’s performance was skewed by an outsized impact from some of its biggest players hemorrhaging sales. Pizza Hut, No. 2, lost 8.2% of its sales in 2025, for instance. In fact, six out of the top 10 QSR pizza chains were negative last year. In addition to Pizza Hut, they included:
Cheese (No. 9, 0.6%) were steady as it goes, while Domino’s extended its market share dominance with a 4.8% gain and No. 7 Jet’s Pizza provided a bright spot with an 11.5% increase. Notably, the overall restaurant industry was up just 3% in 2025, marking the fourth consecutive year that Top 500 sales gains decelerated compared to the prior year. Within that overall cooldown, pizza was the only category to turn negative for sales year- over-year. Every single category in Technomic’s newly released Top 500 report turned in a stronger year-over-year sales performance in 2025, including sandwich, which was up just 0.2%. The QSR pizza category was No. 6, outpaced by burger ($113.3 billion), chicken ($56.3 billion), coffee/café ($53.9 billion), sandwich ($37.4 billion), and Mexican ($35.1 billion) categories, with $31 billion in sales According to Technomic, much of pizza’s challenges have come from an increase in competition from other food segments. Sales at Asian concepts last year, for example, rose 7.8%, while the Mexican category was up
4.7%. Chicken sales increased 5.3% in 2025, following a 9.1% gain in 2024 and five straight years of double-digit growth prior. Some of the category’s plateauing is also likely driven by third-party delivery apps like DoorDash and Uber Eats leveling the playing field for a convenience channel once dominated by pizza. BEYOND THE TOP 10 Not only did pizza underperform every other category in 2025, it also had fewer rocket ships. There were 103 out of 500 chains that generated double-digit sales increases in 2025. Just three were limited-service pizza chains: Lost Pizza Co., a Mississippi-based company founded in 2007, which jumped 15.4% to end the year with $64.3 million and 36 locations (a 16.1% unit count increase) Crust Pizza Co., a “Chicago-style thin” concept headquartered in The Woodlands, Texas, which increased sales by 13.7% to end with $66.4 million and 37 locations (a 15.6% increase) Jet’s Pizza, a Detroit-style pizza concept founded in Detroit in 1978, which increased
No. 4 Papa Johns, -1% No. 5, Marco’s, -2.4%
No. 6, Papa Murphy’s, -3% No. 8, MOD Pizza, -10.6% No. 10, Hungry Howie’s, -5.2% Little Caesars (No. 3, 1.4%) and Chuck E.
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RESTAURANT BUSINESS JULY 2026
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