What meat portions are you using on a 14 inch pizza? I am looking for weight that you are using and not the number of slices. I am still in the research phase of opening a place and need to have a handle on costs of goods sold. I know some places advertise that they use X number of slices of pepperoni but that does not really help because pepperoni comes in many different diameters. I am interested in the ounces of meats that you use per pizza. Pepperoni, sausage, Canadian bacon, ham etc. Ounces used for a one meat topping, ounces used for a two topping or 3 topping. Do you use the same amount for a combo vs a 1 meat topping? I would also be interested in the weights of veggies that you use.
I appreciate the wealth of information that this board provides and I thank all of you that contribute to the board.
Our large is a 15" and I use 5oz of pepperoni, which I feel is a lot. We use smaller pepperoni and they are edge to edge touching when it goes in and shrink a little when cooking. For hand pinched sausage and ham we use 3oz and for bacon between 2 and 2.5. The bacon can vary depending on how it’s diced and therefore how it covers. The ham is just diced slices of Virginia ham we use for our subs. When I make a pizza for myself, I only use about 75% of the pepperoni I use on a customer’s pizza.
Well, i will just say this about toppings. You will set a target weight based on what you think looks/tastes right.
During the year, your meats will change size, veggies will not be as big or TOO big (mushrooms i am looking at you) and it will throw your costs out of whack. Heck anything sliced, if the diameter of the slices changes even 5% it will change how much gets put on a pizza.
With toppings you can go really two routes, you can go the $5 pizza method and strictly enforce weight so as to maintain profit OR you can go the Quality route. If you go this route, take your ideal and add 10-20% to it and use that as your ideal. That way during the year as everything changes, you can maintain your Quality, and not loose profit.
When i bought my store i choose to go the Quality route, i retaught my entire staff to do toppings by sight. I want all my pizza’s looking and tasting as close to the same as possible. Now when i run my cost % i use the highest price seen in the past year as my base price for each topping.
We use a 14-16 beef pepperoni. We put it on the pizza with the edges just about touching. Three rings on a 14". It comes to about 3 oz. Sausage is also sliced. They are farther apart and thicker and the weight is a bit more. Chicken, meatballs, wild game sausages etc all come in between 3-4 oz. I would echo what d9 says. We are shooting for a pizza that looks great. When the customer opens that box I want the response to be “Wow!” Charge what you have to and tell the story.
for our 16 pizza (Large)
sausage, Tenderloin steak, pulled pork, beef Brisket, & smoked chicken slices they get weigh in at 8 ounces.
I forget what we did with pepperoni weight, but I average how many slices I see per ounce we were seeing, laid it on on the pizza how I wanted the coverage, counted it out, and interpolated the weight that way. I spot check our pepperoni on each delivery, and the slices per ounce have been very tight with miniscule variances . I priced off the higher end of the averages so if slices are a bit thick, there’s little loss on my end.
Thanks. All in all looks similar to our portions. A question on sizes… I am curious about doing both 10" and 12". We do 12", 14" & 16". Our unit sales drop as the size gets smaller… i.e. 16" is our best seller. We only sell maybe 20% as many 12" as we do 16" to the extent that I have thought of dropping the size and hoping that the sales would move to the 14" with a higher price point. Do you deliver the 10"? How does it sell compared to the 12"?
We sell very few of the 10". We have them for people who drop in and are looking to get a pizza for 1. At our average volume delco’s we sell about 5 to 10 a day. At our busy delco about 20 a day. For the medium we sell about 10 times that amount. We have a 1 location with seating for 24 and at that one we sell upwards of 40 a day. We have an in store special for a small and a soda for 7.99.
Yes we do deliver the 10". We have no minimum delivery.
The thing about the 10" is that it’s a slice alternative if you don’t do slices.
Not ready to go and not “slice cheap” but about as close as you can get to grabbing that customer.
Years back we did a 6" mini-pan for $3.99 w/ a topping or two.
We offer 8/10/12/14/16. My bulk is 14 then 12, and i actually sell more 10’s then 16’s outside of large orders.
I have considered dropping the 8", but we have a lot of walk-in traffic that is just looking for a pizza for 1, or for the kids (and they can not share a larger pizza for some reason :rolleyes: )
On the upside, since we do NY Thin, we do not waste any dough since we have all the smaller sizes (expect the 8", but only 1 customer regularly gets that NY Thin).
My question with the smaller sizes is how many sales would you actually lose if you dropped them? I suspect many customers that buy the 8" would just order the 10".
I would sure hate to have to have places for stacks of folded boxes up front in five sizes! Three is bad enough.
When cheese prices got out of hand, I had to drop the 18" rather than charging a crazy amount for it. People flipped out. I brought it back when cheese came back down. I personally think they order it just because they like saying “Jumbo”.
I thank all of you that have replied. Some very useful information has been shared. PizzaPirate I do like your chart and that can be very useful. Here is another question for you all. Different toppings have different costs. If one is using 4 main meat topping such as pepperoni, ham, sausage and pulled pork. To make this easy let’s say the cost of sausage is .80, pepperoni is .90, ham is 1.00 and pulled pork is 1.25 for 5 ounces one topping on a 14 inch pie. Do you figure the cost of a one topping pizza based on the highest price one topping for mark up? If the veggies work out to be in the .50 area do you still figure the one topping price at the highest topping level? Most places that I see have extra toppings priced at one amount regardless of what the topping is. Just wondering on how you all do it and how the math works out.
We have three topping prices. Regular topping price is for almost everything (Onions to Pepperoni!) The we have double price toppings like chicken, feta cheese, artichokes etc and triple price toppings such as elk and wild boar and Tenderloin steak. Our extra topping price is the same price as the regular topping price for that item. In other words if you want “extra tenderloin” it will be a triple price topping twice.
Regarding setting the prices, we just let them average out. Yes, we make more money on onions than we do on ham.
I take my highest price topping and apply a % to it. That is the price point i use for all my toppings. You would need to decide what % point works best for you and your customers. But once you have it figured out, it makes it very easy to update/verify later on if your pricing model is still correct.
We’ve only ever had only 2 sizes since we started, and have not had any complaints for larger or smaller since
I have noticed that most places in my area only go as large as a 14" pie, I would like to do something as large as a full sheet pan sized pizza in a sheeted, super-thin crust, and we are experimenting with that now
We went a different route for our protein toppings,
We have our standard toppings of Sausage, Pepperoni, Bacon, Canadian Bacon, & smoked chicken. set at one price for any of them
Then we have our premium priced toppings of Beef Brisket, Pulled Pork, Tenderlojn Steak & Lobster which vary from item to item
Sauces are standard pizza sauce & Garlic butter, Focaccia (Sliced maters, herbs, olive oil & romano) that are included in the price of a pie, then we have an additional charge for Alfredo which is not a premade sauce, we assemble it with heavy cream and Romano right on the crust, it cooks and thickens in the oven
