Fun Pizza Facts
- Approximately three billion pizzas are sold in the United States every year, plus an additional one billion frozen pizzas.
- Pizza is a $30 billion industry in the United States.
- Women are twice as likely as men to order vegetarian toppings on their pizza.
- About 36 percent of all pizzas contain pepperoni, making it the most popular topping in the United States.
- Louis XIII is the most expensive pizza, which costs $12,000 and was created by Renato Viola for an exclusive crowd in Salerno, Italy.
- The “Margherita” pizza is named after Queen Margherita visited Italy in 1889. During her trip to Naples, she requested to try different types of pizza, and that is when the baker Raffaele Esposito who worked at Da Pietro Pizzeria (now Pizzeria Brandi) invented a pie with red tomato sauce, white mozzarella, and green basil. These ingredients represented the colors of the Italian flag and have been a classic flavor ever since.
- The first known pizzeria, Antica Pizzeria, opened in Naples, Italy, in 1738.
- The first pizzeria in the United States was opened by Gennaro Lombardi in 1895 in New York City.
- The word “pizza” dates back over a thousand years — it was first mentioned in a Latin text written in southern Italy.
- The record for the world’s largest pizza depends on how you slice it. According to Guinness World Records, the record for the world’s largest circular pizza was set at Norwood Hypermarket in South Africa in 1990. The gigantic pie measured 122 feet 8 inches across, weighed 26,883 pounds, and contained 9,920 pounds of flour, 3,968 pounds of cheese, and 1,984 pounds of sauce. In 2005, the record for the world’s largest rectangular pizza was set in Iowa Falls, Iowa. Pizza restaurant owner Bill Bahr and a team of 200 helpers created the 129 X 98.6-foot pizza from 4,000 pounds of cheese, 700 pounds of sauce, and 9,500 sections of crust. The enormous pie was enough to feed the town’s 5,200 residents ten slices of pizza each.