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In Toast’s blind survey of 1,466 U.S. diners, published in July, TikTok was Gen Z’s No. 1 way to discover a restaurant, at 38%, ahead of word of mouth. Across all diners it sat near the bottom of the list at 14%. Bankrate’s 2025 tipping survey found only 43% of Gen Z always tip at a sit-down restaurant, against 84% of boomers. And McKinsey found 73% of Gen Z diners put food quality among their top three disappointments after a recent visit, against 57% of everyone else.
Your youngest customers find you through somebody else’s camera, judge you on the pie, and won’t prop up your crew’s pay through the tip screen. Those are three separate problems in your shop, and none of them costs much to fix.
They find you through someone else’s phone
For all diners, Toast’s list still starts where you’d expect: word of mouth at 38%, walking or driving past at 30%, Facebook at 27%. Map apps came in at 18% and search engines at 16%. Gen Z flips the order. PMQ, covering the same survey, noted that TikTok’s pull drops off sharply for Gen X and boomers, and that urban diners lean on social media more than suburban ones do.
Pizza Today, citing an Eater and Vox Media survey, reported that 77% of Gen Z learn about new restaurants through social media, 72% trust the reviews they see there, and 60% say “what I ordered” videos make them want to try a place. The video that sells your shop is usually a customer opening your box, not your ad.
People are also shopping around. In Toast’s data, 64% of guests tried a new restaurant in the past month, up from 39% a year earlier. The younger customer who shows up because of a video isn’t loyal yet. They’re testing you.
The pie on camera has to be the pie on Friday
Gen Z isn’t the easy crowd. McKinsey’s 73% figure says they’re the most likely to leave disappointed by the food. Their spending is also tighter than their age suggests. McKinsey found their limited-service restaurant spending growth fell 19 points over two years, against 11 to 12 points for older groups. Black Box Intelligence data reported by Nation’s Restaurant News showed millennials and Gen Z trailing the industry’s traffic by nearly a point through the first part of 2025, after leading it in 2024.
The appetite for pizza is there. In Datassential’s 2024 pizza report, 36% of Gen Z said they were eating more pizza than the year before, double the 18% of all consumers. They just want to spend small. NinetyEight, a Gen Z marketing agency, found 89% buy themselves a little treat after a stressful day and 74% cap it at $10 or less, per Pizza Today.
That’s an argument for one item on your board under $10 that comes out fast and looks right on a phone: a slice, a personal pie, a box of knots. It’s not an argument for a coupon war. Toast found price and value (55%) and food quality (51%) are what turn discovery into a visit, and the shop that wins on the second one doesn’t have to fight as hard on the first.
Gen Z doesn’t read your menu board first. It watches a stranger open your box.
Don’t build your crew’s pay on their tips
Bankrate’s survey of 2,445 adults, run by YouGov, found the youngest adults tip least, and least generously. Only 16% of Gen Z usually tip 20% or more at a sit-down restaurant, against 30% of millennials, 40% of Gen X and 49% of boomers. For pickup it’s worse across the board: only 12% of all Americans always tip on takeout.
If your counter crew took the job because of what the tip line pays on a busy night, check who’s buying on that night. A shop near a campus or a high school can run a late-night or after-school window where most tickets come from the customers least likely to tip. The tip screen won’t fix that. A base rate that makes the shift worth working will, and we laid out how to price that shift in where the labor line breaks.
The same customer who skips the tip will still post the pie. Your Google profile and your own feed are where a video of a good pie keeps working after it’s posted.
Free cheat sheet: 15 pizzeria cost benchmarks on one page
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The limitation: none of these surveys is about pizza alone, and none splits out independents. They also define Gen Z differently: Bankrate counted adults 18 to 28, Black Box everyone born from 1997 on. Toast sells restaurant software and NinetyEight sells marketing to the generation it surveys. We also found vendor surveys of how Gen Z orders pizza specifically, but the ones we saw were small online panels with no stated weighting, so we left them out. Nobody publishes how many of an independent pizzeria’s orders come from Gen Z. Your POS can tell you roughly, by daypart and channel. Watch whether the younger zip codes in Black Box’s traffic data recover in 2026, because that tells you whether this customer is cutting back or just shopping around.
