Get our free one-page cheat sheet of pizzeria cost benchmarks: food, labor, rent and delivery, with a blank for your own numbers.
A pepperoni pizza costs about $2.84 in food to make at 12 inches, $3.87 at 14 and $5.04 at 16, built from Pizza Today’s portioning method and restaurant-supply list prices published this fall. Add a plain box and a sauce cup and it’s $3.35, $4.47 and $5.67. Cheese is nearly half the food cost at every size. That’s Oven Scars’ arithmetic. The point is the method, so you can rerun it with your invoices.
Start with weights, not prices
Prices change every week. Your portions shouldn’t. Tom Lehmann, Pizza Today’s resident dough expert, laid out a way to set portions for every size from one test pie. Weigh what you put on a pie you like, divide by its area to get a “density number,” then multiply by each size’s area. His worked example starts with 11 ounces of dough, 5 ounces of sauce and 6 ounces of cheese on a 12-inch, which becomes 15, 6.8 and 8.16 ounces on a 14-inch and 19.5, 8.88 and 10.66 ounces on a 16-inch. The sauce and cheese weights are his examples. Swap in yours.
The areas do the work. A 12-inch pie covers 113.04 square inches and a 16-inch covers 200.96, so the bigger pie needs about 78% more of everything on top. We used the same scaling for pepperoni. Two ounces on the 12-inch is our illustration, not a spec. At Hormel’s about 14 slices per ounce, that’s 28 slices. Scaled up, it comes to 2.72 ounces on the 14 and about 3.56 on the 16.
For the dough, we priced flour only. In a Lehmann formula of 100% flour, 58% water and small amounts of salt, sugar, yeast and oil, flour is about 61% of the dough’s weight.
Cheese is the line that moves
Your mozzarella is probably priced off the CME cheddar block (the Chicago Mercantile Exchange’s benchmark cheese price), plus a spread your distributor sets, as we laid out in how the block market sets your cheese price. Blocks closed at $1.60 a pound on Nov. 2, down from a weekly average of $1.7385 the week of Oct. 19.
Nobody publishes the spread, so we used a list price. WebstaurantStore sells a 20-pound case of low-moisture, part-skim shredded mozzarella for $72.49, or $59.20 for members of its paid Plus program. That’s $3.62 a pound at list. It’s close to what one Pizza Today columnist reported paying: 2.5 ounces of cheese for $0.59, about $3.78 a pound.
At $3.62, the cheese on our pies costs $1.36, $1.85 and $2.41. Every 10 cents on your cheese price is about 3.75 cents on the 12-inch and about 6.7 cents on the 16.
The rest of the pie is cheap until you add it up
Flour. General Mills’ All Trumps high-gluten lists at $39.99 for a 50-pound bag, falling to $33 a bag in lots of 50. That’s 80 cents a pound at list. Other high-gluten flours on the same site run $24.99 to $39.99 a bag. Flour is the cheapest line on the pie.
Sauce. Bella Vista pizza sauce lists at $28.49 for six #10 cans, about 5 cents an ounce. A premium sauce costs more: Stanislaus Full-Red lists at $7.33 a can, about 54% more per can.
Pepperoni. Hormel’s 25-pound case lists at $178.99, or $143.78 for Plus members. That’s $7.16 a pound at list, about 45 cents an ounce. Two ounces is 89 cents.
Packaging. Plain boxes list at 42 cents for a 12-inch, 51 cents for a 14 and 54 cents for a 16, one bundle at a time. At 10 bundles they drop to 31, 37 and 41 cents. A lidded 2-ounce cup for the garlic dip is 9 cents. The box barely grows with the pie. The cheese grows 78%.
Run the 16-inch again at the same site’s bulk and member prices and the all-in cost falls from $5.67 to about $4.69. That’s a dollar a pie, from the same catalog on the same day.
The box costs about the same at every size. The cheese doesn’t. Price the pie from the scale, not from the menu next door.
Published per-pie numbers are thin
Very few operators publish what a pie costs them. Jason Cipriani, writing about his food truck in Pizza Today, put a 10-inch cheese at $1.11 in food, a pepperoni at $1.93 and soft goods at $0.73 a pizza. Dan Collier of PizzaMan Dan’s wrote that his large pepperoni costs $3.98 to make and sells for $21.99. Nick Bogacz of Caliente Pizza & Draft House told Pizza Today his “Godzilla” pizza costs $5.40 to make.
That’s three shops. It isn’t a benchmark, and we couldn’t find a published survey of per-pie food cost by size for independents. Once you have your own plate cost, the Pizza Price Calculator turns it into a price for every size. Our companion piece on how to price a pizza covers the markup. To see whether your cheese, flour and box prices are drifting between invoices, watch the cost tracker.
Free cheat sheet: 15 pizzeria cost benchmarks on one page
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The limitation: every price here is a list price from one online restaurant supplier, not a full-line distributor’s delivered contract price, and the two can sit far apart in either direction. The plate cost also leaves out what doesn’t go on the pie: the cornmeal on the peel, the oil and yeast in the dough, the pies that get remade and the cheese that misses the skin. Your scale tells you what a pie should cost. Your inventory count tells you what it actually cost, and the difference between the two is a number worth tracking on its own.
Common questions
How much does it cost to make a pizza?
At list prices from one restaurant supplier this fall, a pepperoni pie runs about $2.84 in food at 12 inches, $3.87 at 14 and $5.04 at 16, by our math. Add the box and a sauce cup and it's about $3.35, $4.47 and $5.67. Your own invoices will land somewhere else.
What is the most expensive ingredient on a pizza?
Cheese. At about $3.62 a pound listed for shredded mozzarella, it's nearly half the food cost of a pepperoni pie at every size we priced. Every 10 cents your cheese price moves is nearly 7 cents on a 16-inch.
How much does a pizza box add to the cost of a pizza?
Plain 12- to 16-inch boxes list at about 42 to 54 cents each on WebstaurantStore when you buy one bundle. Buy 10 bundles or more and it drops to about 31 to 41 cents.
How much more does a 16-inch pizza cost to make than a 12-inch?
About 78% more, because it has about 78% more area to cover with sauce, cheese and toppings. In our math the food goes from about $2.84 to $5.04.
