Wednesday,
February 21, 2007
US Alone Eats 3 Billion
Pizza Pies a Year!!!! -Forbes Magazine
The
hungry citizens of the United
States eat 350 slices of pizza a second, or
400 acres (17.4 million square feet) per day. Don't even think of the
geographical scale of a year's pizza!
As an industry in
the U.S.,
pizza tops $30 billion. The country's 69,000 pizzerias make up 17% of all
restaurants. The nation eats 3 billion pizzas in a year--that's pies, not
slices; 93% of Americans eat at least one pizza per month. That's 23 pounds
(including the toppings) of pizza a year.
Pizza has gone
global, and it is governed by a heavy commitment to contemporary logistics.
In India, one
pizzeria manager, Pavan Bhatia, describes his Pizza
Corner Domino Pizza store as "more a logistics company than food service,
since supply chain management is the factor that differentiates the winners
from the losers" in this business.
Bhatia's Pizza
Corner store in New Delhi gets its potatoes from
Canada, where it is shipped
to ports in Mumbai and Delhi.
Pizza Corner pepperoni comes from Australia,
and jalapeno requirements are fulfilled from Spain. Cheese is sourced closer to
home--from Bangalore.
Pizza may be an Italian cuisine, but it is the last word in global supply
chains.
The hungry
citizens of the United
States eat 350 slices of pizza a second, or
400 acres (17.4 million square feet) per day. Don't even think of the
geographical scale of a year's pizza!
As an industry in
the U.S.,
pizza tops $30 billion. The country's 69,000 pizzerias make up 17% of all
restaurants. The nation eats 3 billion pizzas in a year--that's pies, not
slices; 93% of Americans eat at least one pizza per month. That's 23 pounds
(including the toppings) of pizza a year.
Americans'
favorite topping is pepperoni (36% of all orders), and that means a lot of
sausage must be transported. Other favorite toppings are mushrooms, extra
cheese, green peppers and, of course, onions.
On the other
hand, specialty or gourmet toppings are becoming popular regionally in the U.S. Some pies
come with shrimp, chicken, artichoke hearts, eggplant, sprouts, crayfish--even
duck and Canadian bacon.
Mozzarella cheese
accounts for 30% of all pizza cheese, but other favorites include provolone,
ricotta, parmesan and romano. The amount of cheese
used runs into the hundreds of millions of pounds.
Pizza Hut, a part
of Yum! Brands ($9.56
billion in sales 2006), is the world's largest pizzeria franchise. It has 34,000
outlets in over 100 countries (Sri Lanka,
Bangladesh, India, Israel,
Hong Kong and Serbia,
to name but a few). The chain's most popular pizza is the deep-dish Pan Pizza.
Each year, Pizza Hut uses 300 million pounds of cheese, 525 million pounds of
tomatoes, and 200 million pounds of pepperoni, which, if sliced, would girdle
the Earth twice and still have enough over to reach the moon.
Domino's
Pizza has only 8,000 stores in 54
countries and sales of $4.6 billion. It is known for its development of centralized
ingredient logistics systems.
One of these
central logistics systems is PWC UAE Logistics. It works with Specialized
Services Establishment and Domino's restaurants in Bahran, Qatar, Saudia
Arabia and Jordan. An order fulfillment center is used to service these places.
"By creating
a centralized order fulfillment center, we will be able to provide real-time
response to all our GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council states] and Levant-based
outfits," says Ibrahim Al-Jammaz,
the managing director of Specialized Services Establishment.
The inbound
logistics delivery of pizza ingredients involves the use of sea lane container
ships, aircraft for specialty items, and trucks, trucks and more trucks for
pizza deliveries.
Outbound
logistics from stores all over the world make use of scooters, bikes,
fleet-footed delivery boys and vans.
The last word:
The first pizzeria in New York,
according to Italian history, was John's on Bleeker Street.
The son of the original owner drove a Lincoln
whose license plate read, "NO SLICES."
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