It’s one of those Friday nights where my brain is imbued with an inevitable thought: I am craving pizza. I trot to my local supermarket and absentmindedly pick up a margherita pizza that looks worthy of an end-of-week dinner, plus a can of Diet Coke for good measure. At the checkout, I have a £5 note at the ready. “That’ll be £7.25 please,” says the server. I begrudgingly tap my card and scurry away. I check the receipt as I leave: the pizza was £5.75.
A trip down the pizza aisle used to be an inexpensive affair. There would be the pale, cardboard-tasting supermarket own-brand pizzas for £1, Pizza Express Sloppy Giuseppes galore and Dr Oetkters stuffed in the freezer section. Being charged more than £3 would have been a punishable offence. You were guaranteed a simple, quick and satisfying meal (even if it wasn’t exactly high in nutritional value). Now, though, ready-meal aisles are filled with luxury, Neapolitan-style sourdough pizzas reminiscent of the Napoli slice that so aroused Julia Roberts in Eat Pray Love.
There’s plenty of choice these days, and every supermarket is getting involved in gussying up the humble pizza. At Tesco, an oval-shaped funghi e tartufo pizza is topped with lashings of truffle, buttery mushrooms and mozzarella di bufala (£5.75). A Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference spicy pepperoni and roquito pizza with a “hand-stretched, wood-fired base” costs £4.75. Waitrose’s own brand Urban Pizza comes in a carbonara flavour as well as a pepperoni and sticky hot honey combo (both £5.50). M&S even sells a chicken Kyiv and garlic butter pizza (£6). It’s only at Lidl that I find a fancy-looking Italian ham, portobello mushroom and mascarpone Deluxe pizza for under a fiver (£3.99).
Sure, the humble budget pizza is still available, but they are being overshadowed by the stench of truffle and Italian cured meats. The era of the £5 pizza is, of course, a result of inflation and Brexit (extra custom charges have been imposed on imported foodstuffs, thus increasing the prices of Italian produce in the UK). At the same time, though, pizza has never been more fashionable, as the boutique Italian restaurant scene expands throughout the country. And supermarkets are capitalising on it.
“Pizza is now very in vogue,” says Gerardo del Guercio, a pizza connoisseur at the food-reviewing site Bite Twice. “It’s becoming similar to New York – pizza is crossing over to be a lifestyle as opposed to being food.” In London, posting a picture at the trendy Hammersmith pizzeria Crisp W6 is a sign of cool among foodie circles. “On social media, there are lots of aesthetically good-looking pizzas, and when people go to the shops, they want to see that as well.”
Supermarkets are playing catch-up in the process. According to the consumer intelligence company NIQ, the UK supermarket pizza industry is worth £1.8bn, but it’s been largely stagnant for decades – and, some would argue, in need of desperate change. The top three bestselling oven pizza brands are: Chicago Town, the deep-dish frozen-pizza brand that arrived on shelves in 1992; Goodfella’s, which launched in the UK in 1995 with a deep-pan offering; and Pizza Express, the retail arm of the chain pizzeria that entered supermarkets in 1998. But those brands feel like fossils in comparison to what’s on offer today.
David Milner is the chair of Crosta & Mollica, the only UK pizza supermarket brand that makes its products in Italy. The brand’s stripy packaging is unmissable (and you’ve probably seen it since they’re stocked everywhere from Tesco to Morrisons). The company has undoubtedly been at the forefront of the £5 pizza wave, with more than 20 pizzas in the market and business sales of over £100m at retail, according to Milner (a Crosta & Mollica pizza is around £5.70). But the brand is still competing against the likes of Chicago Town. “In some respects, those brands are sort of lost in time, they’re from another era,” says Milner. “But they are still the big brands and that’s what people buy the most of – those big pizzas laden with lots of cheese and pepperoni. But the issue is that all of those brands are in decline, none of them grow.” Pizza Express’s supermarket lines are a good example of this. “They leveraged their restaurant credentials and brand name recognition in supermarkets, but the issue is that you’re a restaurant selling a product in a supermarket that bears no resemblance to your actual product. It’s not what people are looking for any more.”
The question is, though, if there are still cheaper options out there, why are so many UK consumers willing to pay upwards of £5 for an oven pizza? It’s partly down to the “fakeaway” trend, a pandemic-inspired habit, which is essentially buying a premium ready meal that could pass for restaurant quality without the cost of an actual takeaway. Kate Hardcastle MBE, a retail and consumer expert, tells me that supermarkets have leaned into “treat at home culture” by positioning pizza as a quality meal rather than just a budget buy. “There’s been a shift from ‘just feed the family’ to ‘let’s enjoy this meal,’” she explains. “Fakeaway pizza nights feel indulgent now, with sourdough bases, slow-cooked tomato sauces and artisan toppings. The days of generic frozen pizza are fading, replaced by supermarket brands mimicking the best pizzerias.”
Naturally, ingredients like buffalo mozzarella and truffle oil come with a price tag. “There’s no denying that prices have risen, but the reality is that many consumers are choosing quality over quantity,” says Hardcastle. “A single, high-quality pizza is replacing the ‘pile them high’ approach of old. It’s a shift towards mindful spending rather than just cost-cutting.” Milner says that Crosta & Mollica charges a premium price tag because of the high-quality production that goes into their pizzas. They’re all made in the company’s factory in the foothills of the Dolomite mountains, where each pizza is handcrafted using Dolomite water and baked on slabs made out of Mount Etna stone. “We’re proud that our pizzas cost more, because they’re premium quality and that’s why the consumer comes back to us,” he says.
The desire for high-quality eats is partly down to a growing public awareness surrounding ultra-processed food, too. The bestselling non-fiction book Ultra Processed People by Chris van Tulleken has been a wake-up call for many, who are beginning to question the number of unnecessary ingredients and preservatives added to mass-produced foods. There’s a growing acknowledgement that regularly eating ultra-processed foods can cause health complications including cardiovascular disease, certain cancers, obesity and type 2 diabetes – so people are looking for transparency from supermarket brands.
Nick Buckland, the co-owner of the trendy London-based pizzeria Yard Sale, thinks that people are leaning towards artisanal pizzas because they feel more authentic and healthier. “People are willing to spend more because they’re becoming more conscious about what they’re putting into their bodies, rather than accepting the cheapest mass-marketed product,” says Buckland. “And that’s down to how many ingredients are in their mass-produced products, and if it’s a high-quality product.” People have a growing interest in pizza itself, too. When Buckland and his co-founder Johnnie Tate launched Yard Sale 11 years ago, they were often asked the same question: “Is the pizza American or is it Italian?” But as the UK’s pizza scene has increased in popularity, he’s noticed people recognising the difference between even regional Italian pizzas, among them Neapolitan and Sicilian (the former has a thin base and airy crust while the latter has a thicker, focaccia-like rectangular base).
We know these pimped-up supermarket pizzas look good – but what about the taste, according to the experts? Or, well, me. I’m personally a fan of the Crosta & Mollica Pizzas, but I haven’t trained hundreds of pizza chefs worldwide like Gregorio Fierro, an industry consultant and master instructor at the Scuola Italiana Pizzaioli chef school. He tells me he won’t touch the stuff, and nor will he buy oven pizzas for his family. “I will, though, concede that there are products in the retail freezer case that are vastly better than what were traditionally available,” he says.
Connoisseur Del Guercio, meanwhile, tells me that oven pizzas aren’t worth the money, “and they taste like crap, they’re just made to look fancy”. In fact, he doesn’t think they’re worth it at all. If people want a real pizza experience, he says, a margherita in a Neapolitan pizzeria may only cost around £9 – just a bit more money than a store-bought one. “You’ll never be able to replicate that taste of freshly baked piping hot dough coming out of the oven at a pizzeria,” he says. “That’s just the beauty of pizza. You can package it up to look like whatever you want – but ultimately, it’s not the real thing.”