Pizza, in its purest form—resplendent in gooey cheese, an unabashed refined-flour crust and perhaps a bold scattering of spicy Italian sausage—is synonymous with outright indulgence. And in a food industry where health and wellness impacts everything, that spells trouble to the bottom line. Add in an improving economy, enabling more people to satisfy their desires for comforting indulgences via the local pizzeria, and flat category performance predictably arises as par for the course.
But despite the lack of any strong category-wide growth over the past year, select segments within pizza represent glimpses of innovation. Manufacturers continue to strive toward replicating pizzeria-style traits in frozen retail pizzas, while gluten-free has introduced new streams of revenue. Suppliers continue to offer new ingredients for benchtop R&D experimentation, while equipment manufacturers regularly build new, dynamic capabilities into pizza manufacturing that improve quality while streamlining production.