The Super Bowl is this weekend, which traditionally means America is getting ready for an evening of salads and catching up on the latest Zadie Smith novel while contemplating how they can best reduce their climate footprint.
Or …
America will bet on the Los Angeles Rams and Cincinnati Bengals while ordering pizza. Could go either way, really. And a new survey from the Top Agency has some insight into which chain pizzas America will likely be ordering from this weekend.
Pizza Pandemic Boom
So, in case you didn’t notice, people were stressed during the pandemic. While some people used their downtime to do more cooking, sometimes you just need your comfort food carbs and cheese.
Top Agency found that visits to 12 of the largest pizza chains increased by 32% last year.
To figure out who reigned supreme, Top compared the offline GPS cell phone data of millions of Americans to that held by 12 of the largest pizza chains across 48 states, in order to determine the top five chains in each state.
So What’s The Biggest Chain?
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Little Caesars (CZR) was by far the most popular chain, ranking as the number one choice in 24 states. California and Texas are as culturally apart as is possible in the United States of America, but both of these huge states pick Little Caesars as the favorite.
So, it would seem, a chain did in fact out pizza the Pizza Hut.
Up next is Papa John’s, which was number one in nine states, including Pennsylvania and Virginia.
From there, Domino’s (DPZUF) had seven states, Pizza Hut (YUM) had two, Godfather’s Pizza topped New York and nowhere else (ah, New York, ever defiant), and Marco's Pizza was the top in Indiana and South Carolina.
California Pizza Kitchen, Papa Murphy's and Cicis (CICI) all make appearances on the list, but weren’t the favorite of any one state. Amusingly, after its first three favorites, Vermont’s four and fifth place entrees just read None and None. Vermont wants what it wants, apparently.
But Why Little Caesars?
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If you’re wondering why Little Caesars beat your favorite chain, well, there’s no accounting for taste, really. One man’s trash pizza is another’s guilty pleasure, as pizza doesn’t have to be “good” to be good. That’s kinda the point of pizza, really.
Still, here are two likely reasons.
The first is that Little Caesars spends a lot of money on advertising. To announce that it teamed with DoorDash (DASH) for a delivery service, it debuted a Super Bowl ad with Rainn Wilson in 2020, and it spent over $100 million in advertising in digital, print and national TV in the last year, according to Media Radar.
The second reason is that the chain has a reputation for being super cheap. So much so that when it made news when it had to raise the price of its $5 Hot-N-Ready Classic Pepperoni pizza to $5.55. Cheap is hard to argue with, as people love a value, after all. And if you’re throwing a Super Bowl party, you’ve got to figure out how to stretch your budget.
