Get our free one-page cheat sheet of pizzeria cost benchmarks: food, labor, rent and delivery, with a blank for your own numbers.
Middleby’s own online store lists a single-deck Bakers Pride Y-600 at $14,414 and a Middleby Marshall PS540G gas conveyor at $20,183. Both are U.S. starting prices, before freight, a gas line, or installation. That’s the number on the quote. It isn’t the cost of a second oven, and it isn’t the real question. The real question is whether your oven is what’s slowing down Friday night. Plenty of shops buy one before they check.
Capacity is napkin math, so do the napkin math
Equipment dealer KaTom publishes a sizing method that’s worth borrowing even though it comes from someone who sells ovens. Count the pies you sell in your busiest 15 minutes and multiply by four. Then add a 20% cushion. In KaTom’s example, 18 pies in the peak 15 minutes projects to 72 an hour and a target of about 87.
Then do the oven side. A deck that holds six pies on an eight-minute bake turns 7.5 times an hour, so it can bake 45 pies in theory. At a realistic 80% utilization, that’s about 36. A gap like 87 against 36 is an oven problem. A gap of a few pies is usually fixed by how you load the oven and stagger the orders, not by buying another one.
Conveyors move more pies. Daniel Estrada, CEO of the repair platform 86 Repairs, told PMQ that a conveyor can produce about 80 pizzas per hour. Foodservice Equipment & Supplies’ conveyor guide puts large models at about 100 pizzas an hour per oven, medium models at 75, and small units at 20 to 25, and notes that high-volume operators typically run two medium ovens. Those are rated numbers. Your pie size, toppings, and bake time decide the real one.
A second oven only fixes an oven problem
Stand at the oven during peak and watch where pies wait. If dressed pies are stacking up on the makeline waiting for stone or belt space, the oven is the bottleneck. If pies come out on time and then wait at the cut table, the boxing station, or for a driver, a second oven just builds that line up faster.
The usual culprits upstream are the same ones we covered in the menu item slowing your line: walks off the makeline and mid-bake touches. Those cost nothing to fix. An oven costs five figures.
Decks add a labor question too. Estrada’s point to PMQ was that deck ovens need an experienced operator to hold consistent quality, because the back runs hotter and someone has to manage placement and timing. A second deck at peak usually means a second skilled person on the oven at peak. Put that wage in the math before you sign.
A second oven doesn’t fix a slow kitchen. It fixes a slow oven, and only if the oven is what’s slow.
Price the whole install, not the box
The hood. FES notes that current mechanical codes require venting for conveyor ovens, and that the exhaust hood shouldn’t have to change if ovens of the same size are added as a stack. Bakers Pride builds the Y-600 frame fully welded to allow for double-stacking. So the cheap way to add an oven is up, not out. Going out means more hood. One HVAC contractor estimates a new commercial hood at $950 to $1,200 per linear foot, or about $10,000 for ten feet, before permits. Confirm with your local inspector before anyone quotes you.
The gas. That Y-600 is rated at 120,000 Btu an hour. The EIA figures natural gas at 1,036 Btu per cubic foot, and the U.S. average commercial gas price was $13.03 per thousand cubic feet in July 2026. Burning flat out for 10 hours, that deck would use about $15 of gas a day, or roughly $450 over 30 days. Treat that as a ceiling: a thermostat-controlled deck cycles, and nobody publishes a real duty cycle for a working pizzeria. Your utility bill after 60 days is the real number.
The case nobody prices: the night the only oven dies
Estrada told PMQ that an oven being down one night “might mean missing weekend sales by 50% or more,” and that the average deck repair takes three times longer to resolve than a conveyor repair. If you run on one oven, a single Friday failure is an expense you’re already carrying. You just haven’t been billed for it yet.
That’s a real argument for a second oven. It shouldn’t be the only one. If the peak count says you have room, a maintenance plan and a repair tech’s cell number are cheaper insurance than a $14,000 backup.
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The honest limitation: nobody publishes how many orders a pizzeria loses to a slow oven, and there’s still no industry benchmark for pies per oven hour in real shops. The closest data point is customer patience. In a Talker Research survey of 2,000 U.S. adults for Meals on Wheels America, people said they start getting impatient after 29 minutes when the restaurant is within 10 miles. That tells you how long they’ll wait. It doesn’t tell you how many of them stopped ordering. Your own peak-hour count is the only number that answers it for your shop.
