The pizza market - United Kingdom

1.1 Definition and presentation

The pizza stems from the Italian cuisine, and the modern pizza was invented in Naples. Pizza is made from bread dough and is topped with a range of ingredients (for example tomato sauce, cheese, olives, olive oil) whereby it is baked in an oven. Today, pizza is made and consumed all over the world.

Pizza’s main distribution channels include:

• Commercial catering (restaurants, fast-food restaurant chains, sometimes as franchise).
• Hypermarkets and Supermarkets
• Collective catering

Global pizza consumption amounts to 951 pizzas every second, or 448,000 tons of pizza eaten per year. The biggest consumers of pizzas in aggregate numbers are the Americans, followed by the French and Italians. [Planetoscope]. The UK pizza market is growing; in 2019 pizza was the most purchased item in restaurants, the second most purchased foods in supermarkets, and fourth most popular dinner meal.

In the UK, over 90% of outlets are chains. Players in the fresh pizza segment include Pizzahut and Domino’s. In the frozen pizza offering we find distributors such as Dr Oetker and Tesco.

There is a growing trend towards consumption at home. This is facilitated by the catering and online delivery industry, but also through a wider product offering in products such as frozen pizzas. Consumption to take away or take in is further fueled by the arrival of FoodTech players, which has contributed to additional boosts in growth for the pizza market and its’ distributors.