I Investigated 12 US Pizza Chains (Only 3 Are Worth Buying)

There is probably a Domino's box in your recycling right now, and the cheese on that pizza lists modified food starch as its second ingredient. Domino's prints that itself. The enemy is a labeling rule, 21 CFR 101.11, that makes chains post calories and never what's in the food. In 2023, a federal judge threw out a fake cheese lawsuit [music] because nobody had promised real cheese. And the strange part isn't the cheap chain, it's the expensive one. Three of these are still real, including one whose cheese list is four words long. Nine chains to walk past, three worth ordering. Let's start with what real mozzarella even means because there's a hard number on it. The Food and Drug Administration wrote a standard of identity for it. 21 CFR 133.155. Minimum milk fat 45% by weight of the solids. Moisture above 52% and no higher than 60. That rule also lists what you're allowed to add. Milk, cultures, salt, enzymes, [music] vinegar. Starch is not on that list. Vegetable oil is not on that list. Whey protein concentrate is not on that list. So why cut it? Because real mozzarella is expensive and it behaves badly. [music] It rides the dairy market up and down all year and it fights you inside a hot delivery bag. It weeps oil, browns too fast, and clumps in the shred bin. Add a little starch, and the water stops running, the shreds stay loose, and the pizza survives a 30-minute drive looking like the photo on the wall. That's the trade. [music] Texture for truth. And get this, the second you add that starch, the stuff on your pizza legally stops being mozzarella cheese and becomes a blend. On a package in a grocery store, they'd have to tell you that in plain English. On a menu board, they don't have to say a word. Here's the thing. [music] That rule covers calories and a nutrition panel you can ask for at the counter. It has never covered an ingredient list. So, a chain can write the word cheese on a lit sign, hand you something that legally isn't cheese, and break no law. That's the entire label game. And it runs in the aisle where nobody reads anything because there's nothing to read. Later, I'll show you a 60-second test you can run in the parking lot that tells you which side of that line your pizza falls on. Chain number one, Sbarro. This is the one you smell before you see it. Mall food court, second floor, a pan of pizza the size of a car hood sitting under a heat lamp while somebody slides a slice onto a paper plate. If you've taken a kid school shopping in the last 30 years, you've eaten this pizza standing up. Sbarro will not show you a national ingredient statement. I looked, and it isn't there. What they will show you is a balance sheet, and the balance sheet is rough. Sbarro filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy in April of 2011 [music] and wiped out 80% of a $400 million debt load. Then they did it again in March of 2014, three years later, going back to court for another $140 million. In February of that same year, they announced they were closing 155 of the roughly 400 restaurants they owned in North America. That's the receipt, not a lawsuit about an ingredient. A company that has now stood in front of a bankruptcy judge twice and explained that the math on this pizza does not work. When a chain reorganizes that hard, the savings do not come out of the rent on a mall lease. They come out of the pan. For a price anchor, Sbarro ran a national deal in October of 2025 at $10.99 for a 14-inch New York style cheese pie. Buy that once a week, and you're at $571 a year. What you're actually buying there is time, not fresh time, reheated time. Here's what makes this one particularly frustrating. The format itself is honest. A big pan cut into squares, sold by the slice, is how New York has fed people for a century. Sbarro didn't invent a shortcut. They built a business where the pizza has to sit under a lamp for 40 minutes and still look edible. And every decision after that flows downhill from the lamp. But this next chain built its whole business on you eating more than one slice. Chain number two, CeCe's. This is the birthday party pizza. Buffet line, plastic tray, a conveyor oven pushing out small pies while a kid in a paper hat swaps the pans. Somebody in your family has had a birthday here. And if you have grandkids, you've paid for it. Run the math the way the restaurant has to run it. An all-you-can-eat buffet only works if the cost per pie is low enough that a hungry teenager cannot hurt you. Every dollar of food cost you pull out of a pizza goes straight into surviving the month. So the incentive is not to make the best pizza on the block. The incentive is to make the cheapest pizza a person will eat four slices of without complaining. And even that did not work. CeCe's filed Chapter 11 on January 25th, 2021. The company's primary lender had picked up $82 million of its debt the month before and effectively took the chain over through the filing. At the time, CeCe's and its franchises ran 318 locations across 26 states. That was roughly half of what the chain had at its peak about a decade earlier. Turn the package around on this one, and there's no package to turn around. That's the part that bothers me. You're handed a tray at the door and told to go crazy, and the one thing you cannot do anywhere in that building is read [music] anything. They're banking on the fact that a buffet feels generous, and generosity is very good at stopping questions. What you get is soft, sweet crust, sauce with the sugar dialed up, and cheese that goes glossy under the warmer instead of stretching. It isn't poison. It's engineered to be forgettable at volume, which is its own kind of insult. And a buffet feels like a bargain precisely because you stop [music] counting. Nobody adds up what a family spends here across a year, and not one dollar of it buys a single line of information about what you ate. Now, the next chain is the one people defend in the comments [music] because it costs three times as much and looks like the honest choice. Chain number three, Blaze Pizza. This is the fast casual one with the open flame oven and the line where you point at what you want. It reads artisanal from 30 feet away. Blistered crust, 90 seconds in a stone oven, the whole show. And I want to be fair because Blaze genuinely gets something right that almost nobody else in this video does. Look at the ingredient list for their classic dough. Wheat flour, malted barley flour, water, Durum semolina, sugar, salt, spice, extra virgin olive oil, yeast. That's the whole list. No dough conditioners, no soybean oil, no maltodextrin, no relaxers. Semolina and olive oil in a chain crust is a real decision that costs real money, and they deserve credit for making it. Then you get to the cheese. Blaze publishes that, too. Low moisture whole milk mozzarella. And right behind it, potato starch and canola oil, then cellulose and natamycin. Whole milk mozzarella is a genuine upgrade over part skim. And I won't pretend otherwise, but the starch is sitting right there in a pizza priced like a restaurant meal on a crust that proves the company knew exactly how to do it properly when it wanted to. Fix one line on one spec sheet, and Blaze moves straight over to the good half of this list. That's how close it is. If this is already saving you from a bad shop, do me a favor and hit subscribe. We publish one of these every week. And that's the twist running underneath this whole video. The shortcut is almost never about ability. It's about which part of the pizza the customer is watching while it's made. Blaze fixes the part you stand and watch and cuts the part that shows up already melted. What makes this particularly annoying is the price. You're paying close to sit-down restaurant money for a personal pizza on the strength of an open flame and a wooden peel. They're banking on the theater doing the work the ingredient list is supposed to do. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it. But the next chain [music] is aimed at peo

post calories and never what's in the food. In 2023, a federal judge threw out a fake cheese lawsuit [music] because nobody had promised real cheese. And the strange part isn't the cheap chain, it's the expensive one. Three of these are

still real, including one whose cheese list is four words long. Nine chains to walk past, three worth ordering. Let's start with what real mozzarella even means because there's a hard number on it. The Food and Drug Administration wrote a standard of identity for it. 21

CFR 133.155. Minimum milk fat 45% by weight of the solids. Moisture above 52% and no higher than 60. That rule also lists what you're allowed to add. Milk, cultures, salt, enzymes, [music] vinegar. Starch is not on that list. Vegetable oil is

not on that list. Whey protein concentrate is not on that list. So why cut it? Because real mozzarella is expensive and it behaves badly. [music] It rides the dairy market up and down all year and it fights you inside a hot

delivery bag. It weeps oil, browns too fast, and clumps in the shred bin. Add a little starch, and the water stops running, the shreds stay loose, and the pizza survives a 30inut drive looking like the photo on the wall. That's the

trade. [music] Texture for truth. And get this, the second you add that starch, the stuff on your pizza legally stops being mozzarella cheese and becomes a blend.

On a package in a grocery store, they'd have to tell you that in plain English.

on a menu board. They don't have to say a word. Here's the thing. [music] That rule covers calories and a nutrition panel you can ask for at the counter. It has never covered an ingredient list.

So, a chain can write the word cheese on a lit sign, hand you something that legally isn't cheese, and break no law.

That's the entire label game. And it runs in the aisle where nobody reads anything because there's nothing to read. Later, I'll show you a 60-second test you can run in the parking lot that tells you which side of that line your

pizza falls on. Chain number one, Sabarro. This is the one you smell before you see it. Mall food court, second floor, a pan of pizza the size of a car hood sitting under a heat lamp while somebody slides a slice onto a

paper plate. If you've taken a kid school shopping in the last 30 years, you've eaten this pizza standing up.

Sabara will not show you a national ingredient statement. I looked and it isn't there. What they will show you is a balance sheet, and the balance sheet is rough. Sabaro filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy in April of 2011 [music] and

wiped out 80% of a $400 million debt load. Then they did it again in March of 2014, 3 years later, going back to court for another 140 million. In February of that same year, they announced they were closing 155 of the roughly 400

restaurants they owned in North America. That's the receipt, not a lawsuit about an ingredient. A company that has now stood in front of a bankruptcy judge twice and explained that the math on this pizza does not work. When a chain

reorganizes that hard, the savings do not come out of the rent on a mall lease. They come out of the pan. For a price anchor, Sabarro ran a national deal in October of 2025 at $10.99 for a 14-in New York style cheese pie.

Buy that once a week and you're at $571 a year. What you're actually buying there is time, not fresh time, reheated time. Here's what makes this one particularly frustrating. The format itself is honest. A big pan cut into

squares, sold by the slice, is how New York has fed people for a century.

Sabarro didn't invent a shortcut. They built a business where the pizza has to sit under a lamp for 40 minutes and still look edible. And every decision after that flows downhill from the lamp.

But this next chain built its whole business on you eating more than one slice. Chain number two, CeCe's. This is the birthday party pizza. Buffet line, plastic tray, a conveyor oven pushing out small pies while a kid in a paper

hat swaps the pans. Somebody in your family has had a birthday here. And if you have grandkids, you've paid for it.

Run the math the way the restaurant has to run it. An all you can eat buffet only works if the cost per pie is low enough that a hungry teenager cannot hurt you. Every dollar of food cost you

pull out of a pizza goes straight into surviving the month. So the incentive is not to make the best pizza on the block.

The incentive is to make the cheapest pizza a person will eat four slices of without complaining. And even that did not work. CC's filed chapter 11 on January 25th, 2021.

The company's primary lender had picked up $82 million of its debt the month before and effectively took the chain over through the filing.

At the time, Cece's and its franchises ran 318 locations across 26 states. That was roughly half of what the chain had at its peak about a decade earlier.

Turn the package around on this one and there's no package to turn around. That's the part that bothers me. You're handed a tray at the door and told to go crazy, and the one thing you cannot do anywhere in that building is read

[music] anything. They're banking on the fact that a buffet feels generous, and generosity is very good at stopping questions. What you get is soft, sweet crust, sauce with the sugar dialed up, and cheese that goes glossy under the

warmer instead of stretching. It isn't poison. It's engineered to be forgettable at volume, which is its own kind of insult. And a buffet feels like a bargain precisely because you stop [music] counting. Nobody adds up what a family spends here across a year, and

not one dollar of it buys a single line of information about what you ate. Now, the next chain is the one people defend in the comments [music] because it costs three times as much and looks like the honest choice.

Chain number three, Blaze Pizza. This is the fast casual one with the open flame oven and the line where you point at what you want. It reads artisal from 30 ft away. Blistered crust, 90 seconds in a stone oven, the whole show. And I want

to be fair because Blaze genuinely gets something right that almost nobody else in this video does. Look at the ingredient list for their classic dough.

Wheat flour, molted barley flour, water, Durham semolina, sugar, salt, spice, extravirgin olive oil, yeast. That's the whole list. No dough conditioners, no soybean oil, no malttodextrin, no relaxers.

Semolina and olive oil in a chain crust is a real decision that costs real money, and they deserve credit for making it. Then you get to the cheese.

Blaze publishes that, too. Low moisture whole milk mozzarella. And right behind it, potato starch and canola oil, then cellulose and natamiasin.

Whole milk mozzarella is a genuine upgrade over part skim. And I won't pretend otherwise, but the starch is sitting right there in a pizza priced like a restaurant meal on a crust that proves the company knew exactly how to

do it properly when it wanted to. Fix one line on one spec sheet and Blaze moves straight over to the good half of this list. That's how close it is. If this is already saving you from a bad

shop, do me a favor and hit subscribe. We publish one of these every week. And that's the twist running underneath this whole video. The shortcut is almost never about ability. It's about which part of the pizza the customer is

watching while it's made. Blaze fix the part you stand and watch and cut the part that shows up already melted. What makes this particularly annoying is the price. You're paying close to sitown restaurant money for a personal pizza on

the strength of an open flame and a wooden peel. They're banking on the theater doing the work the ingredient list is supposed to do. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it. But the next chain [music] is aimed at people who can't

read the menu board yet. Chain number four, Chuck-E-Cheese. This is the one with the ball pit, the animatronics, and the token machine. And for a lot of kids, it's the first pizza they ever taste. I went in expecting the worst.

And their instore mozzarella is clean. [music] Pasteurized milk, cheese cultures, salt, enzymes. The trick isn't in the cheese, it's in what they brush on top of it. Pull up Chuck-E-Cheese's own ingredient document and find the item they call garlic butter. First

ingredient, liquid and hydrogenated soybean oil. Then water. Then salt. Keep reading and you'll hit natural and artificial flavors. Then beta carotene added for color. Then vitamin A palmitate added. That is margarine.

There isn't one molecule of butter in the thing they named butter. They dyed it yellow and added back a vitamin Real butter carries naturally, which tells you exactly what they were imitating. It goes on greasy and cools waxy and it

coats the rim so the crust tastes rich when the crust underneath is flour, water, and soybean oil. Order the stuffed crust and it gets stranger. The string cheese they run through the rim lists modified food starch E1442 as its

second [music] ingredient, right after the milk. So, the cheese on top of the pizza is real and the cheese hidden inside the dough is cut. They put the honest one exactly where you can [music] see it. The real kicker is who this is

aimed at. A parent walks in already braced to overpay for tokens so [music] the food never gets inspected. They're banking on you being too busy watching a six-year-old to turn a slice over. And look at the rest of the tray. The

pepperoni carries BHA and BHT. The Canadian bacon has modified cornstarch in the cure. The grilled chicken has isolated soy protein with modified food starch and carrageenan built in. None of that is on the menu board and all of it

sits in Chuck-E-Cheese's own published document, which is where I got it. They aren't hiding. Nobody's looking.

Remember that split between what's [music] visible and what's buried because the next chain does the identical thing and almost nobody catches it. Chain number five, Little Caesars. This is the $5 box on the warming rack by the register. Nobody

walks in expecting a revelation. And I'll be honest with you, this brand surprised me more than any other name in this video. Look at the ingredient list for the cheese on a standard Little Caesar's pizza. Low moisture, part skim

mozzarella cheese, monster cheese, and powdered cellulose to prevent caking. That is the entire statement. Two real cheeses and an anti-caking agent. The cheapest national pizza in America is running cleaner cheese than chains charging double for it. And I did not

expect to say that sentence out loud. Now order the stuffed crust. That cheese reads part skim mozzarella cheese and then modified food starch. Same brand, same store, same night. The cheese you can see is real. And the cheese buried

inside the crust is the shortcut product because nobody inspects the part they have to bite into. Then there's the crazy bread. And everybody loves the crazy bread. The spread they paint across it is soybean oil, water, [music] salt, hydrogenated soybean oil, natural

and artificial flavors, mono and diglycerides, sodium benzoate, beta carotene for color, and vitamin A palmitate. Margarine again, same formula as Chuck-E-Cheese, [music] different logo. This is where the shelf gets weird. Little Caesars just proved the honest version of the cheese is

affordable at $5 and change, which means every chain charging double and cutting theirs anyway has run out of excuses.

They didn't cut it because they couldn't afford not to. They cut it because they could. There's a reason it works here, and it's worth understanding. Little Caesars sells the pizza off a rack by the door, already made, and you carry it

to your car. It never sits in an insulated bag on a passenger seat for half an hour. No delivery window means no engineering problem. So, the cheese never needed rescuing. So, order the regular round pizza, skip the stuffed

crust and the bread, and you walk out with cleaner food than almost anything coming next. But the next chain figured out how to sell you the restaurant without the restaurant. Chain number six, California Pizza Kitchen. This is the one that lives in two places at

once. There's the sit-down restaurant with the barbecue chicken pizza and the cloth napkins, and then there's the box in your freezer with the same logo printed on it. Shoppers assume the freezer one is the restaurant's recipe, scaled up and boxed. That assumption is

the entire product. It isn't the restaurant's recipe, and you don't have to take my word for it because Nestle said so in open court. Nestle has held the license to the CPK frozen pizza line since 2010 when it picked the rights up

from Craft. When California Pizza Kitchen filed Chapter 11 in July of 2020 and tried to claw those trademark rights back, Nestle sued. They told the court that CPK must not be allowed to manipulate the bankruptcy process to unwind a decades old licensing

transaction which operated as an effective sale of its frozen pizza business to Nestle. Read that phrase again, an effective sale. The restaurant chain does not make the frozen pizza carrying its name and hasn't for over a decade. A different multinational makes

it under contract in a plant you'll never see to a spec you'll never read.

That's a premium costume in its purest form. You're paying a restaurant price for a logo that got licensed out before some of the people buying it were old enough to drive. Bottom line, nobody lied to you on the front of that box.

[music] They just never once volunteered who was actually in the kitchen. And the box is built so the question never occurs to you. Now, think about why a chain would want that deal. Licensing your name is close to free money. You

ship no product, staff no plant, buy no cheese, and a check arrives. [music] The company on the other end owns every decision about what goes in the food.

And its job is to hit a grocery store price point, not to protect a restaurant's reputation.

Now, the next one is the biggest name on this entire list, and it's where the price tag and the ingredient list stop making sense together. Chain number seven, Pizza Hut. This is the Red Roof.

This is the book it personal pan you earned for reading in third grade and the salad bar with the shredded carrots.

For a lot of people watching, Pizza Hut isn't a chain at all. It's a memory. And that trust is exactly what makes this one land. Pizza links to its own ingredient search tool right off its nutrition page. So go look at the pizza

cheese yourself. Part skim mozzarella cheese, pasteurized milk and skim milk, cheese cultures, salt, enzymes, and then modified food starch. second ingredient, then cellulose to prevent clumping, then potassium chloride, then natural flavors. The original pan is worse than it looks. That crisp golden bottom

everybody grew up loving isn't baked, it's fried. The pan oil is soybean oil with TBHQ added to protect freshness.

[music] And the dough sits in it while it cooks. That explains something people have described for years without knowing why. Crisp outside, heavy an hour later.

That isn't the cheese. It's a fried crust wearing a baked crust's [music] name. And the buttery blend they brush around the edge is soybean oil, water, salt, [music] mono and diglycerides, preservatives, natural flavor, beta carotene for color with vitamin A

palmitate added. That's the third chain in this video selling a butter that contains no butter. Now, here's the one that actually got me. In Canada, Pizza Hut's own ingredient listing for pizza mozzarella runs milk, modified milk ingredients, bacterial culture, salt,

calcium chloride, microbial enzyme, and cellulose powder. No modified food starch anywhere on it. Just not here.

Same brand, same [music] logo, same oven, same corporate parent, and a border on a map decides whether starch goes into the cheese on your kid's pizza. Nobody had to build it that way, and we got the cheaper call. If you're

ordering here anyway, and plenty of people will, get it hand tossed and skip the buttery blend at the edge. That won't fix the starch in the cheese, but it drops the fried base and the dyed spread in one move. But the next chain

does something worse than that. It makes the shortcut sound like the standard. Chain number eight, Domino's. This is the one that shows up in 30 minutes with a tracker running on your phone.

Domino's rebuilt its whole reputation on an apology about ingredients on national television, which is what makes the current statement so uncomfortable.

Domino's publishes it right on its own website. The pizza cheese reads part skim mozzarella cheese, pasteurized milk cultures salt enzymes [music] and then modified food starch. Second ingredient again, then cellulose to prevent caking. Then non-fat milk, then whey protein concentrate, then flavors.

than sodium propriionate added as a preservative. Whey protein concentrate is the part people skim past. That's a cheesem byproduct. The watery stuff you normally drain off, dried, and added back in to pad the numbers. Sodium propriate is a

mold inhibitor. Neither one belongs to anything the FDA would let you call mozzarella cheese. And Domino's isn't hiding any of it. They're just not saying it out loud on the menu board, and they don't have to. It doesn't stop

at the cheese. The hand tossed dough carries sodium steroid lactylate, an enzyme with wheat starch, ascorbic acid, and lcysteine monohydrochloride, which is a dough relaxer that makes machine handling easier. And the garlic dipping sauce is soybean oil, hydrogenated

soybean oil, salt, natural flavor, soy lecithin, artificial flavor, and beta carotene. No dairy in it anywhere.

Right now, Domino's runs a national mix and match at $6.99 each and a large one topping carry out at $7.99.

Order that large once a week for a year and you've spent $41,548 on an engineered substitute.

Cheap food is fine. Cheap food is how a lot of families get through a Friday.

Cheap food that got quietly redesigned in a lab while the marketing walked the other direction is a different conversation.

That's what bothers me here specifically. Domino's stood up and admitted its pizza wasn't [music] good enough, and people respected them enormously for it. That apology bought a decade of goodwill. It did not buy the starch out of the cheese. And the final

chain on this list is the one I'd be most annoyed to have ever defended.

Chain number nine, Papa John's. Better ingredients, better pizza. You know the line. You've heard it since the '9s.

It's printed on the box, and it is doing an enormous amount of work. So, let me tell you what happened to that slogan because it went to court.

Pizza Hut sued Papa John's for false advertising in August of 1998. On November 17th, 1999, a federal jury found that the slogan together with the sauce and dough claims running alongside it [music] were false or misleading and likely to deceive consumers. On January

3rd, 2000, the court awarded Pizza Hut $467,619.75 for corrective advertising and issued an injunction barring Papa John's from using the line at all. Then the Fifth Circuit reversed it on September 19th, 2000. And the reasoning is the part

worth carrying around with you. The appeals court held that the slogan standing alone is not an objectifiable statement of fact upon which consumers would be justified in relying.

Sit with that for a second. [music] A federal appeals court did not rule that the pizza was better. It ruled that the promise was too vague to count as a promise at all. And that's precisely why they're still allowed to say it on every

box in America. That isn't a scandal. That's the law working exactly as written. and it's the whole reason this video needed to exist. Their cheese, to be fair, is clean. Pasteurized milk, cultures, salt, enzymes. The crust is six ingredients. Papa John's is not the

worst pizza in this video. Not by a long way. It's the loudest claim in this video, [music] and that's a different problem. And the signature dip, soybean oil, water, salt, hydrogenated soybean oil, dehydrated garlic, natural flavors, soycithin, mono and diglycerides, lactic

acid, sodium benzoate, EDTA, citric acid, beta carotene for color, and vitamin A palmitate added. The thing an entire generation calls garlic butter contains no butter and no dairy of any kind. It's dyed margarine with garlic [music] powder in it, and it's the

single most beloved product this company sells. Now, the test I promised you, and you can run it in the parking lot before you ever walk in. [music] Take out your phone and search the chain's name plus the word ingredients. Every national

chain with 20 or more locations publishes this somewhere because the same rule that lets them stay quiet on the menu board still pushes them to make nutrition information available on request. Find the line for pizza cheese.

Then read straight past the word mozzarella because that first word is always fine. It's the second word that tells you everything you came to find out. A good result looks like this.

Pasteurized milk, cheese cultures, salt, enzymes, and then the sentence ends. Maybe powdered cellulose, which is only in there so the shreds don't glue themselves into a brick inside the bag.

That's real cheese with a shipping [music] problem and nothing more than that. A bad result is any of these words turning up in the cheese line. Modified food starch, potato starch, whey protein concentrate, vegetable oil, or the phrase cheese blend, which is what a

product gets called the moment it can no longer legally be called cheese. 60 seconds standing outside before you spend a dime. It works on the dips and the crust spreads, too, which is how you catch the butter that isn't butter.

Every chain in the first half of this video fails at least one line of that test. The three coming up pass it. Now, if you've made it this far, here's the payoff. Three pizza chains that are actually what they say they are, and one

of them costs about the same as the chain you probably ordered from last week. But the surprise isn't that the real ones are better, it's how little any of them had to do differently to stay honest. Chain number 10, Mountain

Mike's Pizza, 1978, PaloAlto, California. Thomas Van Buskerk opened the first one, and the thing this brand has never stopped saying out loud is the exact thing every chain in the first half of this video quietly stopped doing. Dough rolled fresh daily, real

whole milk mozzarella, vegetables and meat sliced in the store. Whole milk mozzarella is the expensive choice, and it isn't close. [music] Part skim is the industry default because you pull the fat out, sell it as cream, and you're

left with a cheese that browns more predictably under a conveyor. Going whole milk means buying back the fat you could have sold on every pie every day forever. Nobody lands on that by accident. Here's the proof you can check

from across the room. The pepperoni curls. Mountain Mike runs a cupstyle pepperoni that curls into a little bowl and chars at the rim. And that only happens with a natural casing pepperoni carrying enough fat to render. Flat pepperoni that lies down like a sticker

is the cheap one. [music] That's what fat you didn't remove actually does. It browns. It crisps. It carries flavor. Starch can't fake any of that, which is why nobody has ever praised a pizza for its texture stability. The reviews all land in the

same place. People don't call it fancy. They call it the pizza that tastes like pizza used to taste. And they're almost always talking about the crust and the char on the meat. It's regional, mostly the western states, right around 300

locations. If you're in California, Nevada, Arizona, Oregon, or Utah, this is sitting in a strip mall near you, and you've driven past it a hundred times without stopping.

Chain number 11, Marco's [music] Pizza. This one starts with a 9-year-old boy getting off a boat. Pasquali Giamarco moved from Sona, Italy to Ohio with his family as a kid. And on February 18th, 1978, he opened the first Marcos on Star

Avenue in Oregon, Ohio. The sauce recipe he and his father worked out together is still what the whole chain runs on. And the dough is made fresh in every store every day. Now, check the cheese because this is where it counts. Marco's cheese

blend is pasteurized, part skim milk, cheese cultures, salt, powdered cellulose, enzymes, [music] and natamycin.

No modified food starch, no added oil, no whey protein concentrate. Over,300 stores, the same national scale as the chains [music] that cut theirs, facing the same delivery bags and the same dairy market, and they didn't do it. And

if this ranking is useful, hit the like button. It really helps the channel cut through the algorithm. I'll give you one honest caveat because nobody here is perfect. Marco's garlic butter is the same liquid and hydrogenated soybean oil

formula as everybody else's. [music] Nobody in this industry has cracked that one. But the pizza itself, the part you came for, [music] is real. People who order here keep saying the same thing in reviews. The cheese actually pulls when

you lift a slice. That pull isn't a marketing word. That's what mozzarella does when nothing has been added to stop it. Marcos is running its New York style at $16.99 in California, Colorado, and Las Vegas right now. Look for the green and red

sign and trust your nose because a store making dough on site smells like a bakery. and a store opening frozen shells does not.

Chain number 12, Papa Murphy's. 1995, when Terry Collins merged 86 Papa Aldo stores, founded in 1981, with 54 Murphy's pizza stores, founded in 1984.

[music] Papa Aldos was running frozen ingredients and losing on quality. Collins killed his own product line and kept the fresh one. A brutal call for a founder and the reason this chain still exists. Take and bake solves the entire

problem this video has been circling. Nobody has to engineer cheese to survive a delivery bag because there is no delivery bag. The pizza is assembled cold in front of you and baked in your own oven 20 minutes later. [music]

Every dollar these other chains spend on starch and stabilizers exists to fight time. And Papa Murphy's just deleted the time. Here's the statement. Their topping cheese reads mozzarella, pasteurized milk, salt, cheese cultures, enzymes, and cheddar, pasteurized milk, salt, cheese cultures, enzymes, anado

for color. That's [music] the whole thing. No starch, no cellulose, no oil, nothing added to survive a car ride.

It's the cleanest cheese line of any national pizza chain I checked, and it isn't close. One caveat, so you can order around it. Their pan crust uses a liquid butter alternative, which is hydrogenated soybean oil again. So, order the original or the thin and you

skip it entirely. [music] And here's the kicker. You could make this yourself with flour, water, yeast, salt, and olive oil in about 90 minutes. Most of which is the dough sitting on the counter doing nothing while you watch

television. We'll put the method in the description. Look for the plain storefront with no dining room and no smell of pizza in the air, which throws people off every time. There's no oven in the building. That's the point.

Here's the one thing worth remembering. Three of the biggest names in America, Domino's, Pizza Hut, and Little Caesar's Stuff Crust, all list modified food starch as the second ingredient in their cheese. And the $5 chain is the one that

left it out of the regular pie. The worst of the bunch is Papa John's because a federal appeals court had to rule that better ingredients was too vague to legally mean anything before they were allowed to keep printing it on

the box. The best is Papa Murphy's, whose cheese statement is four words long and then stops. Next time you order, run the parking lot test. If the word starch shows up anywhere in the cheese line, put the phone down and go

somewhere else. Next week, we found something in a national chicken sandwich that genuinely shocked us. And it is not the chicken, it's what they soak it in before it ever hits the fryer. Drop the brand you still trust in the comments.

We're building the list together. Hit subscribe if this changed how you shop today. We'll see you in the next aisle.