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Do any of you sell pizza or pizza by the slice? How does it do? Your thoughts? Costs? Selling price?

I'll chime in here on this one.

We've checked into this one already.
We can get a local "Domino's" or "Papa John's" to sell us whole pies (LARGE) @ $5.00 a piece. We'll just need to place the phone call about 45 minutes ahead of time.

A local drive-in here in middle Tennessee sells "Papa John's" pizza at $2.00 per slice or $12.00 for a whole pie.

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Barry Floyd
Floyd Entertainment Group
Lebanon, Tennessee

Stardust Drive-In Theatre
Watertown, Tennessee

Pizza works well for some theatres with the cinema pub concept, but I would think it over carefully before jumping into serving pizza. Pizza costs substantially more to make/serve per serving than popcorn and people who are looking for something filling may be tempted to purchase pizza if available rather than the highly profitable popcorn.

Popcorn and Soda are the most profitable things we serve and all new products are considered on a basis of how they would effect sales of popcorn and soda.

What about the "messyness" factor with sticky/gooey/staining foods like pizza and nachos with cheese?

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Our Entrance shares a lobby with Little Caesars and a mini golf course. All by the same owner. Caesars and the theatre are "different" companies nonetheless we do allow slices, crazy bread and cinnimon sticks into the theatre. We don't allow Caesars drinks in, everything is very clearly marked in caesars so there is no confusion. They are coke we are pepsi and hence never the two shall meet. Having Caesars right there is great for our birthday parties and private bookings.

[This message has been edited by Mill (edited August 14, 2002).]

SilverCity has Pizza Hut, but I only see the employee standing there gazing off into nowhere.

These theatres also have KFC, Burger King, New York Fries, Wetzel's Pretzels, Surf City Squeeze, Starbucks and Taco Bell...

And Mr. Pytlak, The place is never clean!

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"Would you like fries with that?"

Little Caesars is a stand-alone store, The increased traffic from the theatre definitly helps but it's primary purpose was pick-up, delivery and a little bit of dine-in.

I don't know if the SilverCity and big Paramount theatres do delivery/pick-up? Pretty tough at the increased prices I would think.

Since this post in 2002, has anyone else offered pizza in their theater and if so, with what results?

I'm leary about the quality of frozen pizza and I'm also not keen on the idea of selling someone else's branded product (Domino's Pizza) without some kind of contract or franchise. Sbarro offers pizza on a franchise basis as either a full restaurant or as an expanded concession option by the slice. They were at ShoWest and I was impressed with their dedication to opening more Sbarro's in theaters.

I chime back in.... since my firtst response to this post was over 5 years ago!

Now that I actually own a theatre, I can respond better to the topic. We now bake our own pizzas and they do sell quite well.
We use a 12" frozen par-baked (partially cooked) crust, top it with Stanislaus "Full-Red" pizza sauce, real mozzarella cheese, bake it for 4 minutes @ 590 degrees and throw it out the window.

We don't really "throw it" but you get the idea. We sell a whole pie for $8.50, or a slice for $2.50. On family movies like Shrek, The Game Plan, etc. we can go thru 30+ pizzas a night. We try to have some made up and waiting in the freezer beforehand and that helps alot time-wise. We only have a two deck electric oven which is the slowest part of the whole process.

Next spring we are converting our entire electric kitchen to gas which will both speed up the heat recovery time on the equipment, and also free-up an additional 200 amps of available electricity to use for other things.

Barry (and others), what do you think about Rialto's comment that you have to carefully consider the impact on popcorn sales before adding other items to your concession?

I've read similar comments in other threads before. Many seem to think that lower profit items like pizza will hurt your bottom line in the long run. I tend to think that offering more filling items with higher perceived value will result in more total concession volume.

For me, I think I would choose a pizza for $8.50 over a couple of bags of popcorn for around the same money. Others will have different tastes. You might reduce profits on a single customer, but would you sell to more customers because of the increased variety and higher perceived value of items like pizza?

I guess it's a similar question as to whether it is a good idea to sell concession items at a lower price to increase sales volume.

So, does pizza help or hurt the bottom line? Did you increase sales volume by offering it?

We make our pizzas much like Barry does, though we already converted to gas. Barry, that conversion will take a major monkey off your back. Cost aside, a gas oven will recover much faster than an electric.

We started selling slices this year. Prior to that, it was a 16 inch pie or nothing. For simplicity, we sell only cheese or pepperoni by the slice. On slower nights, we'll make one pie and put pepperoni on half. On busier nights we'll make a couple of each. The slices aren't a major item here, but they seem to satisfy those who want pizza without buying the whole pie. We'll see how it goes next year.

As for popcorn sales: We play with our menu pretty often. In the past few years we've added pretzels, cotton candy, pizza slices and philly cheese steak sandwiches. Our popcorn sales have remained about the same, per capita.

For those of you who can do pretzels: J&J foods is offering a "Cinna-Pretzel". The pretzel has a Cinnabon-style swirl in the middle, and comes in a microwave bag with a cup of frosting. 40 seconds (thawed) in the nuke and you have a frosted pretzel that tastes like a Cinnabon. $$WOW$$! More of that good, healthy food that drive-ins are known for!

[This message has been edited by rodeojack (edited October 09, 2007).]

Jack is right about the Cinnabon Pretzel. We started selling them last year (2006) and they have become a huge "desert" seller for intermission. We charge $4.00 each for them, and we sell them as fast as we can nuke them.

Do you nuke the Cinnabonn in front of your customer? On that matter, does anyone have a product that is nuked at the concession and do your customers ever object? Thanks, Lola

I've never liked the idea of nuking in front of customers either, but is there another option?

Hmmmm... that's a good question, Lola.

We don't nuke anything out front, but we used to have one in our indoor house.

Generally, we don't use the microwave to heat finished products. The CinnaPretzel would be an exception.

The image issue is probably a good point though. Most people have these things in their homes these days, yet the perception that using a nuke infers lower quality persists.