When you think of American pizza chains a few big names probably come to mind. Domino’s and Pizza Hut are household names in almost every American city and names like Little Caesars and Papa John’s are also there. You’d probably assume that one of these giants would be the largest pizza chain in America but that’s not true. The pizza chain with the most locations in the US is Hunt Brothers Pizza but despite its dominant position chances are you’ve never heard of it.
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10 Pizza Chains That Are Sadly Disappearing in America
Hunt Brothers isn’t just the largest pizza chain in the U.S. — it’s the largest by a wide margin. According to ScrapeHero there will be 9703 Hunt Brothers locations in 2024. Compare that to Domino’s and Pizza Hut which each have nearly 7000 franchise locations. Papa John’s has just 3000 locations less than ⅓ the size of Hunt Brothers so why isn’t the latter a household name?
There are a couple of reasons why you might not be familiar with Hunt Brothers Pizza. For starters despite having the most locations of any American pizza chain it only has a presence in 36 states mostly in the South and Midwest. Compare that to Domino’s Pizza Hut Little Caesars and Papa John’s which have locations in all 50 states. The other major factor is that Hunt Brothers operates on a completely different business model than these other chains quietly hiding its locations from our eyes.
Hunt Brothers was unique from the start. Namesake founder brothers Don Lonnie Jim and Charlie Hunt brought an unusual background to the company. They had grown up in the food industry thanks to their restaurant-owning father but as adults the brothers pivoted to wholesale distribution. Beginning in 1962 they operated a business called Pepe’s Pizza which as the name suggests was not a pizzeria. Instead they made pizza ingredients—dough sauce etc.—and sold them to local businesses. Most of their customers were not restaurants but rather venues that offered food as a sideline such as bars movie theaters and bowling alleys.
