Food Theory: STOP Ordering Your Pizza Like This!

are you the guy that ordered like a dozen pizzas that's me um just so you know i'm not gonna eat them all by myself sure no really i need them for science okay clearly you don't believe me so let me explain you see i'm a youtuber and i need these pizzas for an experiment tip me 18 nobody needs to hear about this how about 20. hello internet welcome to food theory the show that delivers food for thought with extra cheese theorists here's the deal i've eaten a lot of pizza this year and i mean a lot as a matter of fact i've probably eaten more pizza in 2020 than i have in any other year of my life and that's including sophomore year of college which is an accomplishment now i'm sure that we've all had our dining habits upended to some degree thanks in large part to the pandemic in my case ordering pizza has been a safe easy and cost-effective way to get my family of three fed in a pinch but because we've been ordering out so often the cost-effectiveness of it all has suddenly become a top priority now let me just say this up top this episode is not about the finer more subjective aspects of pizza so all you italian new yorker and chicago pizza purists we're gonna hear your arguments in a future episode today is all about who can get delicious pizza to my door and into my stomach for the best value we're talking about the big boys the multinational pizza chains that deliver pizza to the most customers no matter where in the world you're watching this episode from there's a good chance you're familiar with at least one of the four biggest pizza chains worldwide domino's pizza hut little caesars and papa john's now i'll be the first to admit i definitely prefer the pizzas from certain companies on this list over others but at the same time i'm not here to argue against the world's palette these four companies have all managed to strike a chord with customers the world over so today food theory is focusing on a more measurable and objective metric value that's right we're gonna figure out who delivers the pizza that's objectively the best for your buck we've done it with fast food fries we've done it with fast food soft drinks and today food theory is doing it with pizza chains so kick back and enjoy yourself a slice theorists today we're gonna show you the consumer which pie takes the cake now as far as i'm concerned there are a few major categories that need to be addressed the first is how much pizza i'm getting for my dollar i want to know how many grams of pizza my dollar is buying the way i see it if i'm gonna drop my hard-earned money on a pizza it better fill me up look if i wanted to eat food that's actually just air i'd go buy some cotton candy but if i want to feel like there's a giant stone rolling around in my gut and i do that means it's pizza time baby i also want to focus on toppings we definitely gotta judge these pizza chains based on their toppings are they generous with the amounts or are they overcharging relative to other restaurants it's important that we compare like-sized pizzas and it just so happens that all four of our pizza chain restaurants offer a 14-inch option so to keep things fair we only ordered 14 inch pizzas across the board we also stuck with each restaurant's standard pizza crust that is to say no deep dishes no thin crusts no fancy stuff in the case of dominoes and pizza hut that was their 14-inch large hand tossed for little caesars it was the 14-inch round pizza and at papa john's we went for the 14-inch large original crust we assigned this experiment to food theory field researcher amy who you might remember as the tootsie pop champion and our chuck e cheese dance rebel amy ordered the same three pies from each restaurant one cheese pizza one pepperoni pizza and one pizza with extra pepperoni why these three types you ask well the cheese pizza gave us a baseline for the weight and price of each restaurant's 14 inch pizza the pepperoni pizza gave us a sense of how much topping each pizza chain is going to add as well as how much each chain charged for a single topping finally the extra pepperoni pizzas not only gave us an additional data point on topping generosity but also gave us a glimpse into what each pizza chain interprets an extra topping to mean granted 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 all 12 individual pizzas she then meticulously plucked off all the pepperonis and weighed them separately lastly we recorded the takeout menu price of each pizza we debated including the 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 so to eliminate that as a variable we just went for a flat rate pizza no deals no coupons no added fees and 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 almost every pepperoni pizza weighed less than the cheese pizza from that restaurant and extra pepperoni also weighed less sometimes it weighed even less than the regular pepperoni toppings and not just a little bit less i am talking a lot a bit less look at these numbers dominoes cheese 736 grams pepperoni 695 grams extra pepperoni 706 papa john's cheese pizza 885 grams pepperoni 820 grams extra pepperoni even less at 798 grams same thing at pizza hut i mean that is a huge difference i think it's fair to say that when you order a pizza from any of these chains the assumption is that the cheese pizza is the base that you're getting and that adding toppings is getting us all the cheese plus the meat or veggies that you ordered as such the pizza should be getting heavier the more toppings that are getting added but it doesn't seem to be the case somehow the pizza as a whole is getting significantly lighter once you add the toppings meaning that these restaurants are intentionally or no quietly taking away the cheese now maybe this is a cost-saving measure on the part of the restaurant but honestly i think it actually comes down to the employees my best guess for why this might be is that if you get a cheese pizza there's nowhere to hide the employee feels pressured to make sure that the whole pie is covered with topping so you're getting a few extra handfuls of cheese sprinkled on whereas toppings actually cover a lot of sins and holes of marinara sauce peeking out that would explain why at 50 of the restaurants the extra pepperoni pizzas ended up being the lightest of the three which is you know the complete opposite of what i would have expected anyway that was a huge revelation and if you happen to have any theories of your own or you've worked at a pizza restaurant and know what's actually going on here leave a comment down below i'd actually love your thoughts as to what's truly going on here you'll also notice that there was one chain that didn't have this issue and it was little caesar's theirs was the only pepperoni pizza of all the ones that we tested that actually outweighed the cheese so lesson number one coming out of this episode when you order a pizza with toppings you're not getting a cheese pizza plus whatever's on top as you add toppings your cheese amount is decreasing accordingly next i was curious to know which pizzas weighed the most per unit cost by dividing the weight of all three pizzas by the cost of all three pizzas we were able to determine the grams of pizza per dollar for each restaurant in this category good guy little caesars was yet again the runaway winner averaging a whopping 106 grams of pizza per dollar spent no other restaurant was even close second place was papa john's at 56.6 almost half of little caesar's total and that was second place pizza hut actually placed last in this category with a mere 42.6 grams of pizza per dollar the individual pizza that was the most cost optimized was the little caesars pepperoni coming in at 131.7 grams per dollar spent pizza hut's extra pepperoni on the other hand at just 35.5 grams of pizza per dollar was the lowest ranked of all tested so at this point something is already becoming crystal clear little caesars pizzas are more or less the same amount of food as their competitors yet for some reason their prices are just way lower i mean i'm talking half the price the little caesars pepperoni pizza for instance cost us five dollars and 55 cents and again this is the flat rate for the pizza no coupons no deals no nothing well every other pepperoni pizza that we purchased cost us more than 14 bucks so how is little caesars pulling this one off 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 just that much lower well it actually turns out that there's a few reasons for one thing little caesars is a far more stripped down operation than the other pizza chains in the experiment because little caesars doesn't offer dinan to its customers they actually save a ton of money on the overhead they don't have to rent as much square footage they don't have to hire waiters they don't have to have on hand a bunch of dishes and silverware and sinks to wash it all all of that factors into the cost they also do the absolute minimum when it comes to delivery for the past 20 years they haven't had delivery as an option this year was the first year they brought it back and even then it was mostly through third-party apps like doordash so little caesars is outsourcing their delivery while the competitors are shelling out to hire in-house delivery drivers another reason little caesar's prices are so low and this is the one that you might expect is the cost of ingredients for instance little caesars blends less expensive monster cheese with its mozzarella cheese and the competitors don't so that's going to save them there but here's what really surprised me perhaps the biggest reason why little caesars can sell its pizza for less is the fact that they're not entirely in the pizza game they're in the food distribution game if you saw our past food theory and how mcdonald's is actually a real estate company you understand how a restaurant can keep its prices ridiculously low by making its real money in a connected industry in mcdonald's case they got into the real estate game as a way to earn rent off of its franchises in little caesar's case they saw an opportunity for expansion in the food distribution industry way back in the early 1970s like any restaurant little caesars has to deal with the problem of how to get ingredients and products to its various locations so they developed an in-house distribution network but soon realized that the food service distribution game was maybe more lucrative than the pizza game so little caesars took the distribution network and broke it off into a new company today known as blue line food service distribution which sends ingredients and other products to little caesars as well as plenty of other companies outside of the little caesars family since blue line and little caesars are both under the same parent company their distribution costs are heavily subsidized and it helps keep their prices ridiculously low pizza pizza more like trucking trucking so it seems like little caesars has the luxury of not having to worry about pizza profits the same way domino's papa john's and pizza hut do but while their pizza might be cheaper doesn't necessarily mean it's objectively better and we still haven't talked about toppings so let's really dig into those results we've already discussed how adding toppings loses the cheese so that's a given across the board but beyond that i wanted to know who's piling them on 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 we calculated the toppings percentage 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 of the total weight of the pizza how much of that weight is coming from the toppings i'm paying a premium for the extra stuff on top i want to make sure that i'm getting a lot of that extra stuff the restaurant with the best overall toppings percentage was pizza hut whose pepperonis accounted for an average of 17.5 to total weight little caesars with just 7.9 percent had the lowest topping percentage of all the restaurants now if you love pepperoni with all your heart then the pizza hut extra pepperoni pizza is the one for you it had the highest toppings percentage of all individual pizzas with nearly 20 percent conversely the little caesars pepperoni pizza had the lowest topping percentage at just 6.2 percent toppings it would seem is another place that little caesars is cutting its costs but you can't really hate him for it because well they're not charging you for that to understand why let's look at our final category grams of topping per dollar here we took the weight of the isolated pepperonis and divided it by the additional cost that the customer pays in order to upgrade this gives us an idea of which restaurants are over charging for the toppings and looking at the chart it certainly isn't domino's who had the most grams of topping per dollar with 42.2 papa john's was the worst value in this category with just 29.9 grams of topping per dollar but what i really want to talk about here is little caesars yet again whose grams of topping per dollar broke mathematics little caesars is charging the same amount for their cheese pizza as they do their pepperoni pizza that means that they're adding pepperonis for zero dollars that's right they are giving the pepperonis away for free and you can't divide by zero folks which makes their rating in this category defy all mathematics honestly it's pretty obvious that little caesar's toppings are fewer and of a lower quality than the other three restaurants little caesars as pepperonis are thinner they're brittle they don't have that oily texture that you'd expect from a pepperoni like i said before they're definitely skimping on the number that appears on the pizza itself but there's no denying that when it comes to pure dollars and cents if you want something that is technically a pepperoni pizza well it's clearly the best value with a price tag of zero so here we go theorists time to announce our overall winners and losers in the cheese category the little caesars 14 inch round cheese pizza is offering you the best value the papa john's cheese pizza gets second place domino's is third and pizza hut is rounding up the rear now how about the best value pepperoni pizzas well after telling the scores of every pizza across every category little caesars again comes out on top but obviously with the caveat of lower quality pepperonis and fewer on the pie if you're looking for a higher quality pepperoni pizza well domino's offers the second best value with pizza hut in third and papa john's in fourth now the best value for pizza with extra pepperoni is dominos by a wide margin papa john's and pizza hut tie for second and little caesars is in dead last because again they don't really care about the toppings all that much which means that it's now time for the big one the granddaddy of them all when all the scores are tallied up the pizza chain that objectively offers the best value for all of their pizzas is dominoes which is honestly kind of surprising because a few minutes ago it was feeling like little caesars had this thing in the bag the reason they fell so far in the final rankings is the toppings if you just want a cheese pizza or if you want a pepperoni pizza but don't care too much about the amount or quality of the topping well then little caesars is the clear winner hands down no question but because two of our categories factored in the total amount of topping you're getting both by price and weight of the pizza their overall scores suffered which means that in the end little caesars has to settle for a third place ranking domino's thanks to its strong toppings game is your overall pizza chain champ with pizza hut in second and papa john's well and truly in last place neither delivering on value or on toppings so with all our results finally being in there's one last thing to do provided you're into pizzas with all the pepperoni picked off pizza party at amy's but hey that's just a theory a food theory bon appetit thanks for watching food theorists if you dug this episode well you're gonna love our other value optimization episodes like our recent theory on getting the best deal possible on fast food fountain drinks be sure to check it out by clicking the link you see on screen right now you savvy soda shoppers while you're at it click that red subscribe button my friends it costs you nothing but saves you everything well maybe not everything but maybe a couple bucks on the next pizza you buy

Channel: The Food Theorists

Views: 5,263,332

Rating: 4.8795881 out of 5

Keywords: pizza, pizza mukbang, pizza recipe, pizza hut, dominos, domino's, little caesars, papa johns, papa john's, domino's pizza, little caesars pizza, papa john's pizza, pizza order.cheese pizza, cheese, pepperoni, pepperoni pizza, pepperoni pizza recipe, pizza hut mukbang, pizza hut eat the menu, eat the menu pizza hut, eat the menu, food theory, food theorists, matpat, game theory, film theory, chuck e cheese, chuck e cheese pizza, new york pizza, without a recipe pizza

Id: TT4AffJJugs

Length: 15min 39sec (939 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 19 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/AngeloArcana]

So, because this might be the only place that this'll actually get attention; I wanted to answer the video's question about cheese on pizzas.

So, I'm an ex Domino's / Papa John's employee, and I can tell you that this is not an individual employee issue. The discrepancy comes from "portioning" of cheese on a base cheese pizza, and a 1-topping pizza.

To be specific, a "Cheese Pizza" is considered its own unique type of pizza, typically at 1.5x base cheese. Base cheese is provided on any and all 1+ topping pizzas, at the obvious 1.0x. An "Extra Cheese Pizza" tends to be roughly 2.0x base cheese. However, in the cases where in 2-topping pizzas were lighter than 1-toppings, this is consistent with Mat's theory that individual employees are using toppings to cover cheese gaps.

It is against all company policies to give less cheese on 2-topping pizzas than 1-toppings, but the mindset turns into "they won't notice." However, in the case of a "Cheese Pizza" vs a 1-topping, that is company policy, and by design.

[u/SonicFan1524]

Me: orders a Papa John's for delivery. FT: New Video Me: oh, I'll watch while I wait for the pizza

[u/FreddyFighter1]

You can't tell me what to do MatPat, I'll order my Pizza the way I f-ing want to

[u/Pentax25]

I can answer why the pizzas get lighter when you order pepperoni. I work with pizzas and we have a guide to follow.

The base pizza might be 2 spoodles (that’s spoon ladles) of sauce and 2 spoodles of cheese. For a pepperoni, we are told to use a specific number of slices. For a cheese pizza though, we don’t just leave it as it is, we are told to add another spoodle, as if cheese is an extra topping for that pizza. You would probably have to order a pepperoni with extra cheese if you wanted your Margherita pizza to be a consistent control.

This is all done to minimise waste so that each location is making pizzas to the same standard. But it is also to make sure the pizzas cook in the same way. If you overload a pizza with toppings, you’re likely to end up with a pizza that’s too thick and might not cook all the way through. If that’s the case you’ll make people sick or they’ll complain which is what they want to avoid at all costs. This explains why your extra pepperoni has even less cheese, because the pepperoni covers the pizza very well, acting like a layer, and might stop it cooking properly.

Ever notice how most of the time your pizza toppings are in a certain order on your pizza? This is because we’re told to put them on in a specific order so that all of the toppings cook properly and don’t block the others from cooking. We found that if we put pepperoni at the bottom, then covered it with more cheese and other dense toppings like beef, the pepperoni didn’t cook properly and didn’t taste as good.

We’ve also found that when making pizzas, cheese and sauce are the two most dense ingredients. When someone makes a pizza that is overweight (because we also have to weigh them to make sure they’re being made correctly) we usually find that that person is putting on too much cheese or sauce. This makes sense as to why a cheese pizza weighs more than a pepperoni or a pepperoni with extra toppings. When you have a 4oz extra spoodle of cheese and compare it to the thin slices of pepperoni, of course the cheese will be heavier. When you have to take the third spoodle of cheese away for a pepperoni pizza, of course it’s going to get lighter.

I hope this helps!

[u/RusticRogue17]

Maybe caesars is so cheap because it’s so shitty???

[u/Affectionate_Disk106]

He’s teaching us life hacks

[u/postsingularity]

The pizza probably just doesn't cook properly overloaded with cheese and toppings... coupled cost cutting measures.