Turns Out Pretty Much Everyone Out-Pizzas the Hut

Once upon a time, pizza was the king of American fast food, and the second most common type of American restaurant. Today, pizza is merely the sixth most common. It’s long since lost its status as the de facto food of the everyman, which leads us to the existential questions: Can pizza be saved? And whether or not pizza as a category can be saved, there’s still the issue of the elephant in the room. That elephant is Pizza Hut.

Once the undisputed king of the American pizza landscape, Pizza Hut peaked in global influence in the mid-1990s amid the launch of prime nostalgia bait like the Personal Pan Pizza and the Stuffed Crust Pizza. In the decades since, it has stagnated and then languished, always slower to adapt than its peers—leading to this week’s news of the latest wave of closures. Parent company Yum Brands will shutter another 250 Pizza Hut locations in the United States, while also considering a sale of the entire Pizza Hut brand, although you can’t help but wonder who would want to buy it. Would new spokesman Tom Brady be included as part of a sale?

Given these grim tidings, it sounds like a whole lot of other brands have been quite successfully out-pizzaing the Hut. In recent years, Pizza Hut has been consistently losing market share to the likes of Domino’s, Papa John’s, Little Caesars, and countless others, seemingly torn between customer nostalgia for its red-topped dine-in restaurants and the transition of the pizza industry itself to predominantly takeout and delivery. Pizza Hut’s same-store sales in the U.S. fell 5% in 2025, while Domino’s were up at least 2.7% during the first nine months of the year. Domino’s has likewise passed Pizza Hut in both U.S. locations (7,200 to roughly 6,000) and total world locations (21,700 to 19,974), all while generally offering pizzas at lower carry-out prices and arguably better quality. The tone of this heartless Reddit user commentary to the Pizza Hut closure news pretty much sums up the vibe:

Despite international sales looking a bit friendlier for Pizza Hut, there aren’t any genuinely encouraging numbers to be found here. As recently as 2019, Pizza Hut reportedly controlled almost 20% of U.S. pizza chain sales, but that figure has now slid to 15.5%. You begin to wonder: Has every possibility for growth been exhausted? How about a Chipotle-style protein pizza menu aimed at manosphere podcast hosts desperately in search of macronutrients? Would RFK Jr. be down to accept a Pizza Hut sponsorship of the new Dietary Guidelines if they replaced their vegetable oil with beef tallow? Could Pizza Hut food scientists still discover a novel place to stuff cheese that has somehow escaped previous exploitation?

But even if any of that stuff came to pass … is it going to get you back through the doors of a Pizza Hut? Or could nothing short of a time machine to the mid-’90s ever make that an attractive proposition?

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