The overall industry’s sales cooled to 3%, marking the fourth consecutive year of deceleration, but pizza was the only category in the red.

Quick-service pizza sales have been coming back down to earth since the category’s pandemic highs. In 2025, however, the category slipped below the surface, registering a 0.3% year-over-year sales slide following a nominal gain of just 0.6% in 2024 and an increase of 2.8% in 2023, according to the Technomic Top 500 Chain Restaurant Report.

Unit count has followed a similar trajectory, with just a 0.1% gain last year, following 0.6% in 2024 and 1.1% in 2023.

Like much of the industry, the quick-service pizza category’s performance has been all over the map — some big winners, some major laggards and plenty of in-betweens. That said, in 2025, the category’s performance was skewed by an outsized impact from some of its biggest players hemorrhaging sales. Pizza Hut, No. 2, lost 8.2% of its sales in 2025, for instance.

In fact, six out of the top 10 QSR pizza chains were negative last year. In addition to Pizza Hut, they included:

No. 4 Papa Johns, -1%
No. 5, Marco’s, -2.4%
No. 6, Papa Murphy’s, -3%
No. 8, MOD Pizza, -10.6%
No. 10, Hungry Howie’s, -5.2%
Little Caesars (No. 3, 1.4%) and Chuck E. Cheese (No. 9, 0.6%) were steady as it goes, while Domino’s extended its market share dominance with a 4.8% gain and No. 7 Jet’s Pizza provided a bright spot with an 11.5% increase.

Notably, the overall restaurant industry was up just 3% in 2025, marking the fourth consecutive year that Top 500 sales gains decelerated compared to the prior year. Within that overall cooldown, pizza was the only category to turn negative for sales year-over-year.

Every single category in Technomic’s newly released Top 500 report turned in a stronger year-over-year sales performance in 2025, including sandwich, which was up just 0.2%. The QSR pizza category was No. 6, outpaced by burger ($113.3 billion), chicken ($56.3 billion), coffee/café ($53.9 billion), sandwich ($37.4 billion), and Mexican ($35.1 billion) categories, with $31 billion in sales

According to Technomic, much of pizza’s challenges have come from an increase in competition from other food segments. Sales at Asian concepts last year, for example, rose 7.8%, while the Mexican category was up 4.7%. Chicken sales increased 5.3% in 2025, following a 9.1% gain in 2024 and five straight years of double-digit growth prior.

Some of the category’s plateauing is also likely driven by third-party delivery apps like DoorDash and Uber Eats leveling the playing field for a convenience channel once dominated by pizza.

Beyond the top 10
Not only did pizza underperform every other category in 2025, it also had fewer rocket ships. There were 103 out of 500 chains that generated double-digit sales increases in 2025. Just three were limited-service pizza chains:

Lost Pizza Co., a Mississippi-based company founded in 2007, which jumped 15.4% to end the year with $64.3 million and 36 locations (a 16.1% unit count increase)
Crust Pizza Co., a “Chicago-style thin” concept headquartered in The Woodlands, Texas, which increased sales by 13.7% to end with $66.4 million and 37 locations (a 15.6% increase)
Jet’s Pizza, a Detroit-style pizza concept founded in Detroit in 1978, which increased sales by 11.5% to end with $613.4 million and 474 locations (a 5.8% increase)
Out of the 35 limited-service pizza chains in the Top 500, 16 gained sales in 2025 versus 19 that registered declines.

The three chains that generated the steepest drops were all fast casual pizza chains, including Blaze Pizza (-9.6%), MOD Pizza (-10.6%) and Pieology Pizza, which fell by a whopping 26.5%.

Blaze named John Owen as its new CEO earlier this year and his comeback plan includes balancing hospitality with speed, while also improving brand awareness both inside and outside of its core markets. Notably, Blaze closed 43 locations in 2024 and is nearly 60 units smaller than it was at the end of 2020.

MOD was sold to Elite Restaurant Group after closing a significant number of locations in 2024. Like Blaze, its system has significantly retrenched, ending 2025 with 447 locations compared to 485 at the end of 2024 and 489 at the end of 2020.

As for Pieology, its challenges accelerated in 2025. In 2024, the California-based chain lost more than 10% of its sales while its system was whittled down to 45 units last year after finishing 2024 with 103 locations. The chain filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in November. The company grew to about 150 locations by 2017, including about a dozen international locations, after receiving investments from Panda Express founders Andrew and Peggy Cherng, as well as NBA player Kevin Durant.

Pieology was founded in 2011 and is widely considered to be a pioneer of the fast-casual, build-your-own pizza category, alongside Blaze and MOD, as well as Your Pie, PizzaRev, Uncle Maddio’s, Fired Pie, and others. Of note, the entire category has been struggling for years, with challenges exacerbated by the pandemic and changing consumer habits. Your Pie’s sales fell 3.2% in 2025, while its unit count was down 1.6%. Since 2020, more than 16% of the system has closed. PizzaRev received an investment from Buffalo Wild Wings in 2014 when it had just three locations and had 200 more under development. It grew to over 40 locations but is now down to just four.

Meanwhile, Uncle Maddio’s once surpassed 40 locations and is now down to 11, and Fired Pie filed for bankruptcy in 2024 and is now down to eight locations.

Source https://www.restaurantbusinessonline.com/financing/quick-service-pizza-sales-turned-negative-last-year