Pizza is now the most popular food purchased in British restaurants, research for the Pizza, Pasta and Italian Foods Association has shown.
It also found that pizza is the second most popular item bought in supermarkets for dinner, and the fourth most popular dinner item purchased in fast food outlets, withBritons spending around £4.4 billion on pizza every year.
One in six (16 per cent) of pizzas bought in the UK is delivered, and one in three (27 per cent) is chilled or frozen. Overall volume of pizza sales, meanwhile, are up 5 per cent this year.
Director of the association, Jim Winship, said: “When we add up all the different sources of pizza, takeaway, supermarket, pizzerias, Italian restaurants, foodservice outlets, caterers, and so on, and other full-service restaurants serving pizza, we begin to understand how vast Britain’s appetite for pizza is.
“This once simple dish that had its origins as a peasant meal in the fields of the Mediterranean, has been transformed by today’s pizza-makers into something much more. It crosses all manner of socio-economic barriers, and really is for everyone.'
