At One Place

How many pizzas are sold every day?

How many pizzas are sold every day?
somewhere between 3 and 8 million a day in the United States
At the higher figure, Americans eat roughly nine pizzas per person per year — which sounds high until you remember it counts every frozen one.

Two widely repeated industry figures disagree with each other. One says Americans eat 350 slices a second, which works out at about 3.8 million whole pizzas a day. The other says the United States sells about 3 billion pizzas a year, which is 8.2 million a day. The gap is definitional: the lower number counts restaurant slices, the higher one includes frozen supermarket pizza, and neither trade body states clearly which it means. The honest answer is a range with a factor of two in it.

How the figure is arrived at

Trade association survey of operator revenues divided by average ticket price, or point-of-sale scanner data for retail. The two approaches count different things and their outputs get quoted interchangeably, which is how a single country ends up with two "official" pizza figures that differ by more than double.

How confident it is

Low estimate
3,000,000
High estimate
8,000,000
Spread
2.7× between the bounds

Given as a range because the two most-quoted industry figures differ by more than a factor of two and neither publishes its methodology.

Other every day counts

Common questions

How many pizzas are sold every day?
somewhere between 3 and 8 million a day in the United States
How is that estimated?
Trade association survey of operator revenues divided by average ticket price, or point-of-sale scanner data for retail. The two approaches count different things and their outputs get quoted interchangeably, which is how a single country ends up with two "official" pizza figures that differ by more than double.

Related pages

Sources

  1. Typical range compiled from manufacturer specifications — At One Place

How these figures are compiled and checked