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This is part of the Nation’s Restaurant News annual Top 200 report, a proprietary ranking of the foodservice industry’s largest restaurant chains and parent companies.
The leaders of the pack
In the crowded fast-casual pizza segment, two chains — MOD Pizza and Blaze Fast-Fire’d Pizza — emerged as dominant in 2017, growing annual domestic sales by 80 percent and 51 percent, respectively, and now virtually neck-and-neck in the race to the top.
Blaze Fast-Fire’d Pizza was about 3 percent larger in terms of sales, at $279 million, in the Latest Year, compared with MOD Pizza’s $270 million, but MOD had 60 more locations — 297 to Blaze’s 237.
Though the two chains have fairly similar menus, and both go out of their way to appeal to Millennial sensibilities, their approaches are pretty different.
Blaze, based in Pasadena, Calif., focuses on the experience.
“We’ve said from the beginning that Blaze is a modern-day pizza joint,” CEO Jim Mizes said. Young and hip, with positive energy and a cool design, Blaze was developed as a place where people...