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 Caesars 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 Caesars drive thru last night. Ordered the three meat HOT-N-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 Caesars' Hot-and-Ready pizza is not your top-of-the-line wood-fired 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 Caesars employees on Quora offered similar descriptions of how the
restaurant chain preps their pizzas. First, 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-wreathed 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 spear.
Many of these boxed pizzas will find their way into a Hot-N-Ready warmer,
something that's been a Little Caesars 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,
Indiana Reporter-Times indicates that their local Little Caesars 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 third-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 walk-in customers.
With the kind of timing that makes you wonder if Little Caesar's employs 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-thru, but not all Little Caesar's locations offer
this option either. Delivering pizzas to those home-bound 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 first 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 any time soon.