EDITIONS / CASE STUDY / NOV 7, 2026 / FOOD AND BUSINESS
A slice shop on Main Street sells two things, pizza and soft serve. Behind that short menu sits a $49.6 billion U.S. business, a few origin stories that don’t hold up, a cost sheet ruled by cheese and labor, and a run of robot pizza companies that closed. This case study walks through all of it, with a pie you can cut into costs yourself.
Not an official City of El Segundo page. Not affiliated with any pizzeria or chain named here, and nobody paid for this page. Written by Claude (Opus 5.5) with two Claude research helpers on Nov 7, 2026, at the request of Michael Hoydich. Every number opens to its source. The cost model and the cone calculator are estimates you control, not any shop’s books. Paintings are public domain works from the Cleveland Museum of Art’s open access collection.
Tap an era. Each one keeps the claim and the doubt side by side, because pizza history has as many legends as facts.
History.com: Flatbreads with toppings were consumed by the ancient Egyptians, Romans and Greeks.
reported
A fresco uncovered at Pompeii in 2023 went around the world as an ancient pizza. Euronews, reporting the find, gave the experts’ read: Experts believe what’s actually depicted in the fresco is a focaccia, covered with fruit.
No tomato, no mozzarella. reported
History.com describes Naples in the 1700s and early 1800s as a thriving waterfront city notorious for its throngs of working poor, or lazzaroni
. reported
The red part came from the other side of the ocean. The Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT: In the 16th century, tomatoes were brought back to Europe from Peru.
reported
The famous one: The origin story began when the queen of Italy visited Naples in 1889.
National Geographic (Apr 14, 2022) then adds: According to recent research, however, the story is not only just that, a story, but one based on forgery.
The same piece cites an 1853 text describing pizza with basilico, muzzarella, e pomodoro
, decades before the royal visit. reported
Lombardi’s is often called America’s first pizzeria. History.com is careful: He supposedly received his business license for it in 1905, in Lower Manhattan.
Smithsonian reported that a researcher could not track down the legendary 1905 restaurant license that Lombardi supposedly acquired
, and credits an earlier pizzaiolo, Filippo Milone. reported
Either way, pizza stayed a neighborhood food for decades. Smithsonian: Few in the mainstream cared, or even knew what pizza was until after World War II
. reported
Yum Brands’ annual report: The first Pizza Hut restaurant was opened in 1958 in Wichita, Kansas, and within a year, the first franchise unit was opened.
The Kansas Historical Society adds that the two founders, brothers, borrowed $600 from their mother
. fact
Domino’s says in its own annual report: We have been selling quality, affordable food to our customers since 1960.
fact
Mental Floss reports that Wolfgang Puck immediately hired its creator, Ed LaDou, as a pizza chef for his first restaurant, Spago
, and that California Pizza Kitchen went on to open the first CPK in 1985 in Beverly Hills, California.
reported
In 2017 UNESCO inscribed the Art of Neapolitan Pizzaiuolo, which it describes as a culinary practice comprising four different phases relating to the preparation of the dough and its baking in a wood-fired oven
. fact
The Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana’s 2024 rule book sets the bake: I tempi di cottura non devono superare i 60-90 secondi
(baking must not pass 60 to 90 seconds), with the oven dome at 485 °C circa
, about 905 °F, and a pie di diametro tra i 22 e i 35 cm
, 22 to 35 centimeters across. listing
PMQ Pizza Magazine’s 2026 Pizza Power Report (Dec 22, 2025), citing IBISWorld, says U.S. pizza restaurant revenue will reach $49.6 billion this year.
Its snapshot counts 75,736 pizzerias, with revenue down by estimated 0.3%
. reported
Most of those shops are small. PMQ: more than half of the roughly 75,000 pizza restaurants in the U.S. are independents
, which it defines as operators with fewer than 10 units. No source found for this check splits sales between independents and chains. reported
From PMQ’s top 30 ranking, with data from Datassential. Bars are drawn to scale. reported
Domino’s alone reports approximately 23.3% total market share
of U.S. quick service pizza in its 2025 annual report, with a U.S. store count of 7,186 at the end of 2025. And it names the cost that matters most: Cheese is our largest food cost.
fact
Here is where a pie’s price goes. The starting point comes from one operator’s published targets in Pizza Today (Jan 28, 2026): I shoot for a 55% prime cost – meaning labor and food cost total 55%.
His labor goal is 25.5%, and the rest of my fixed costs are 35%, which leaves a profit margin of 10%.
His worked example puts food at 30% of sales. Toast’s guide suggests about 10 to 15% of revenue for rent. reported
Try a preset, then drag. estimate
With the benchmark numbers, about $2.70 of a $27 pie is left over, a 10% margin before taxes and loan payments.
The $27 starting price is the EZ Cheese pie on EZPZ’s Toast page, read Nov 7, 2026, used only as a realistic price. The cost shares are not EZPZ’s; nobody outside a shop knows its costs. listing
DoorDash’s merchant page lists 15% (Basic), 25% (Plus), or 30% (Premier) on delivery. Pickup is 6% on all plans.
listing Restaurant Dive reported on Mar 10, 2026 that Uber Eats Merchant marketplace rates for the Lite tier are rising from 15% to 20%
, that Premium commission rates remain unchanged at 30%
, and that pickup fees rise from 6% to 7%. reported
Set the app share to 40% and the commission to 30% in the model above and a 10% margin drops to under 0. That is the whole case for why chains push their own apps: Domino’s says it generated more than 85% of U.S. retail sales in 2025 from digital channels
. fact
Restaurant Business reported the shift the other way at Papa Johns: The chain now gets 17% of its sales from aggregators
. reported
Why would a pizza shop sell soft serve? The Infatuation’s review of EZPZ in El Segundo answered with the customer’s side: the pizza and ice cream combos here that cost less than $20
. The owner’s side is the add-on. A PMQ case study of one shop cited 27% of customers purchasing desserts
. A soft serve machine maker in the U.K. claims a cone can make an ice cream for as little as 12p … versus the average selling price of an ice cream cone at £2.00
; that is a seller’s claim, so treat it as the optimistic end. reported
Drag to test it. These are example inputs, not EZPZ’s prices or costs. estimate
Per 100 slice customers: 27 cones, $135.00 more in sales and about $108.00 more after the cost of the soft serve, cone and cup.
New Yorkers have a rule of thumb called the pizza principle. Mental Floss traces it to a 1980 New York Times piece by Eric Bram: the price of a slice of pizza has matched, with uncanny precision, the cost of a New York subway ride.
reported
The fare side is easy: ABC7 New York reported A new MTA fare of $3 takes effect on Sunday
in January 2026. The slice side is not. No current, sourced average price for a plain New York slice turned up for this check, so this page can’t tell you whether the rule still holds. reported
The national trend is clearer. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on Oct 14, 2026 that The food away from home index rose 3.5 percent over the last year.
fact
Nation’s Restaurant News: Zume was founded in 2015 with the goal of automating the pizza industry.
It reported that Zume raised $423 million in eight funding rounds
, a Crunchbase figure the article notes is disputed, and that By 2020, Zume had sold its pizza technology business.
In May 2026: Picnic, a maker of robotic pizza machines, has shut down.
The same report lists others: Piestro, Basil Street, Zume Pizza and Chowbotics are now defunct.
reported
The software went further than the hardware. Yum Brands’ annual report says we introduced our Byte by Yum! platform
, and NRN reported in March 2025 that AI ordering Pilots of these technologies are already underway in select Taco Bell and Pizza Hut locations
. reported
NRN, citing Datassential in Nov 2023: Detroit pizza is found on 0.6% of U.S. menus, a 183% increase over the past four years.
reported
California’s AB 1228 increases the minimum wage for fast food employees to $20 per hour, beginning April 1, 2024
, per the state’s Department of Financial Protection and Innovation. It covers national chains of more than 60 establishments and excludes A limited-service restaurant with 60 or fewer establishments nationally that share a common brand.
So a one or two shop independent is not covered by the $20 rule, while the counter staff at a big national chain are. fact
EZPZ, at 321 Main Street, is a small version of every number above. It runs a two item menu, which keeps food waste and training simple. Its whole pies run $24 to $34.50 on its ordering page, and a pizza and soft serve combo, per Curations LA, runs $11.50 to $18. It is one shop with a second listed as coming in the Valley, so it sits on the independent side of PMQ’s count and outside the state’s $20 chain wage rule as written. None of that tells you its margin, and this page does not guess it.
Our full guide to the shop, with hours, prices and every review quoted: EZPZ on Main Street.
All paintings and prints are from the Cleveland Museum of Art open access collection, marked CC0 (public domain) by the museum, and shown from the museum’s own image server. Works that showed people were left out. Pizza and soft serve drawings elsewhere on this site are drawn by code or made with AI and are not photographs.
elsegundo.xyz · EZPZ on Main Street · 25-mile directory · Site updates
Written by Claude (Opus 5.5) on Nov 7, 2026, with two Claude research helpers that read the sources above; the Pizza Today cost figures and the EZPZ opening dates were rechecked on the pages themselves in a browser. Requested by Michael Hoydich, Nov 7, 2026.