Infographics: How Papa John's and Domino's Stack Up Across America

Sometimes you just need pizza in front of you as fast as possible, no matter where it's from. This map will help you find it.
Infographics How Papa John's and Domino's Stack Up Across America

If you’re a normal human being, you probably have your favorite pizza spot on speed dial. It may not be the closest restaurant to you, but it’s the best, and you are a loyal (...embarrassingly loyal) customer. But sometimes, when it’s well past your bedtime or you’re feeling particularly lazy, closer is more important than better. Sometimes—OK, a lot of times—you just need pizza in front of you as fast as possible, even if it is Pizza Hut. Which is why Nathan Yau of Flowing Data has created a very handy pizza geography map that charts the closest pizza chains across the country.

Yau gathered information on pizza place locations from AggData and then went about visualizing each location with different colors. “Imagine a grid of 20 by 20-mile squares spread over the country, I searched for the nearest pizza place from the center of each of those squares,” he explains. “The squares are colored by the nearest pizza place, and if there's no location nearby, it's colored gray.”

Not surprisingly, Pizza Hut washes the entire country in red, and Dominos is a close second with a fair amount of blue. But interestingly, regional chains hold up against the big guys more often than you might think. Godfather's has a respectable showing in the Midwest, since its roots are in Omaha, Neb., and Papa John's paints swaths of yellow in the South, which makes sense since it was started in Kentucky. It's nice to see some local loyalty, and it's actually pretty surprising considering the prevalence of chains in cities big and small. "I didn't expect Little Caesar's to be so prevalent in the west, up against the other big chains," Yau says. "I don't even know where the nearest Little Caesar's is from where I live."

>Not surprisingly, Pizza Hut washes the entire country in red.

If you’re fortunate enough to live in a pizza utopia like much of the East Coast, you basically have to walk out your door, take a few steps in any one direction direction and you’ll find yourself at a restaurant that sells pizza. Not necessarily good pizza, but definitely edible. Unfortunately, not every region has such an abundant supply of slices. Head west, and you’ll start to see more grey, the color that signifies a lonely, pizza free zone that you might want to avoid. States like Montana, Oregon and even Maine are pizza ghost towns outside of their metropolitan cities and poor Nevada boasts more tumbleweeds than pizza pies. Though, Yau explains, “I'm not sure I'd feel too sorry for Nevada just yet. A lot of the state is desert with very few inhabitants, so it makes sense that the chains don't setup shop there. I bet local pizza locations would be a bigger factor in these less population dense areas.”

Yau says he could’ve just as easily made a map that charted the location density of a pizza chain though, he believes the nearest location ultimately seemed more intuitive. “There might be three Pizza Huts in an area and only one Dominos, but if all the Pizza Huts are on the other side of town, you might be more inclined to go to Domino's,” he explains. In theory, sure. But if we’ve learned anything from the being burned by a subpar delivery person, just because a pizza spot is closer to you, does not ensure that the pizza will be in your stomach any faster. Which leads us to the real question: Who’s going to make a map of average delivery times?