We Finally Know How Little Caesar's Pizza Is Really Mad

Little Caesar's unveils the recipe to their pizza that's ready when you are with fresh ingredients and a dough made in house. Discover the savory secrets that make their pies a slice above the rest. Little Caesar's hot and ready pizza is one of the wonders of the fast food world, as one commenter on the Straight Dope forum tells. It Went by Little Caesar's drive through last night. Ordered the three meat hot and ready. The lady had it in her hand when I pulled up to the window. How are they making this magic happen? Some have speculated that Little Caesars is just nuking frozen pizzas, and according to USA TODAY, there was even a scandal when a viral video seemed to indicate that the frozen pizzas in question were actually Digiorno. However, what was shown in the video was just a coincidence with the customer having a cart full of previously purchased frozen pizzas while they stopped at one of Little Caesars locations inside of a Kmart. But while Little Caesar's Hot and Ready pizza is not your top of the line wood fire pizza with Buffalo mozzarella and artisan pancetta, it is at least made from scratch. Little Caesars changed the Hot and Ready Classic and added 33% more pepperoni, which makes it 133% better pizza than before. Several past and present Little Caesar's employees on Quora offered similar descriptions of how the restaurant chain preps their pizza. 1st batches of dough are mixed up every day, though they may be refrigerated for up to three days before being used. The fresh sauce is also prepared daily from bagged tomato paste mixed with their own spice blend and water. When it's time to make the pizzas, the dough is stretched onto a cornmeal coated pan and marked with a three hour expiration time prior to baking. A medium pizza crust is coated with four ounces of sauce, sprinkled with five ounces of cheese and, unless intended to be plain, dressed with toppings. The pizzas are then loaded into racks and baked via a conveyor belt oven for five to six minutes. After the pizza comes out of the oven, it's sliced up and packaged in a cardboard box branded with the chain's distinctive logo featuring a toga clad Laurel wreath. Julius Caesar Happy as a Roman emperor can be The cartoon Caesar gobbles down a slice of pizza while the rest of the pie is impaled on his sphere. Many of these boxed pizzas will find their way into a hot and ready warmer, something that's been a Little Caesar's mainstay since 1997. The maximum amount of time a pizza will spend in that warmer should be just 30 minutes. After that duration, the pizzas are deemed to be insufficiently fresh for walk in customers. But that doesn't mean that these slightly past their prime pizzas will go to waste. An article published in the Martinsville IN Reporter Times indicates that their local Little Caesar's has been known to donate unsold pizzas to an organization that distributes food to the economically disadvantaged. Up until just recently, one place that the Little Caesars Hot and Ready pizzas would not go was into a delivery vehicle. While the chain did offer delivery service in the 20th century, for the past two decades Little Caesars preferred to outsource the function to 3rd party operators such as Grubhub and DoorDash. Apparently the general feeling toward this decision was that the delivery market was so crowded and competitive, the chain felt that it was best to outsource the delivery and put its focus on walking customers. With the kind of timing that makes you wonder if Little Caesars employees a company psychic, they chose to re implement delivery. In January of 2020, the chain had felt it could finally provide the service in a cost effective manner and the move proved to be beneficial when suddenly, just weeks later, delivery was the only game in town. I'm sure they've got it down to a science. Well, that and drive through. But not all Little Caesars locations offer this option either. Delivering pizzas to those homebound by the pandemic proved pretty profitable for the chain, but it gave back to the community too, and donated numerous pizzas to healthcare workers and 1st responders. Perhaps partly as a result of this goodwill, or just the added convenience of delivery, sales figures kept on growing even after the lockdown ended. With so much momentum, the chain doesn't appear to be slowing its roll anytime soon.