For decades, Pizza Hut was woven into British family life: birthday meals, post-shopping stops, weekend outings. The format didn’t really change — the booths, the buffet, the salad station — yet the country around it did.
By 2025, the company had been through administration twice in a year and announced plans to cut its dine-in footprint in half. The brand isn’t gone, but it now occupies a fraction of the space it once did. And the reasons run far deeper than staff costs, inflation or squeezed budgets.
Pizza Hut’s real challenge began long before its recent troubles. It began nearly thirty years ago, when another pizza chain disappeared and the lesson went unnoticed.
1. The 1998 Collapse That Told the Future
When Deep Pan Pizza Co shut down in 1998, the group’s chief executive James Naylor summed up the issue plainly:
Thin bases were becoming more popular, and deep pan no longer matched what customers wanted.
That wasn’t just commentary on one brand. It was a description of Britain’s changing tastes.
The nation was moving away from heavy, dough-laden, American-style pizza. Lighter, crispier, more Italian-leaning pizzas were taking over. Deep Pan Pizza Co didn’t fold because of poor management — it folded because its core product no longer had mass appeal.
Pizza Hut survived. And that survival created a dangerous illusion: “We must be doing it right.”
In reality, they were simply the last major deep-pan operator left — and the market was already drifting away from the style both chains were built on.
2. Pizza Stopped Being an Event and Became an Everyday Food
In the 80s and 90s, going out for pizza felt like an occasion. Today, pizza is everywhere:
- Supermarkets sell fresh-dough, stone-baked, deli-assembled, vegan, gluten-free and “artisan” variants.
- Households own pizza stones, steel plates, Ooni/Gozney ovens and high-heat barbecues.
- YouTube and TikTok have turned home-pizza-making into a mainstream hobby.
Britain learned how to make good pizza at home — often better than the mid-market chains.
Once a food becomes this accessible, a format built around treating it as a special outing starts to lose its reason to exist.
3. Domino’s Won Through Systems, Not Taste
Domino’s never won a culinary argument. What it mastered was delivery logistics:
- Aggressive promotions
- Near-ubiquitous branding
- A slick, low-friction ordering app
- Call-centre-to-door delivery systems long before apps were normal
- Consistent, rapid fulfilment
Young adults don’t sit and compare tasting notes; they see Domino’s as “the normal way you get pizza”. That’s the result of systems design, not flavour.
Pizza Hut’s legacy was dine-in. Domino’s legacy is infrastructure. Infrastructure won.
4. Independents Redefined Quality
The biggest transformation in Britain’s pizza landscape didn’t come from chains — it came from independents:
- Sourdough Neapolitan specialists
- Wood-fired vans at markets and events
- Gastropubs installing serious pizza ovens
- Regional styles (Detroit, New Haven) appearing for the first time
- Credible gluten-free and vegan pizza options
These businesses didn’t sell nostalgia — they sold better pizza.
Once the public recalibrated its idea of what “good pizza” tasted like, Pizza Hut’s profile looked dated: heavy, greasy, overloaded and dense. Exactly the style Britain had already been drifting away from since the late 90s.
5. The Buffet Format Became a Relic
To younger diners, the classic Pizza Hut dine-in experience reads as:
- Retro
- Fixed-format and inflexible
- Too heavy on carbs and sugar
- Strongly associated with out-of-town leisure parks and old shopping centres
The bottomless salad bar and buffet — once selling points — now feel like museum pieces of 1990s casual dining. They have charm for people who grew up with them, but nostalgia is not a business model.
6. Multi-Offering Restaurants Overtook Single-Category Chains
Casual Italian chains such as Prezzo, Zizzi, Carluccio’s, Frankie & Benny’s and Bella Italia didn’t win because they were exceptional. They survived as long as they did because they were versatile.
A group could go out and choose:
- Pizza
- Pasta
- Risotto
- Grills
- Salads
Pizza Hut essentially had one proposition: pizza or nothing. That rigidity gradually turned into a weakness.
Gastropubs went even further. Many now produce stone-baked pizzas that outperform legacy chains, while also offering:
- Burgers
- Small plates
- Chicken dishes
- Brunch menus and cocktails
They swallowed the social-dining space Pizza Hut once dominated.
7. Even PizzaExpress Modernised — and Still Struggled
PizzaExpress:
- Updated its interiors
- Refreshed its menu
- Modernised its brand positioning
- Leant into lighter, Italian-style pizzas
And still needed restructures, refinancing and supermarket licensing to remain stable.
If a more adaptable, thinner-crust brand struggled in the 2020s, a chain still tied to deep-pan heritage and 1990s aesthetics was always going to face a steeper decline.
8. Pizza Hut’s Recent Contraction Is a Symptom, Not the Cause
Pizza Hut has not collapsed. It still runs dozens of restaurants and hundreds of delivery sites.
But entering administration twice in a year and cutting the dine-in estate by half isn’t a short-term shock. It’s the natural endpoint of a long-running mismatch between the product and the public.
The turning point wasn’t 2025 — it was 1998.
Deep Pan Pizza Co’s exit revealed that British consumers were shifting away from the very style Pizza Hut is built on. Pizza Hut outlived the competition and mistook that for proof that the model was healthy. The market had already moved on.
Since then, the UK has embraced:
- Thin and sourdough bases
- Higher-quality independents
- Pizza as a commodity, not a rare treat
- Gastropubs as the default casual dining option
- Delivery-first thinking
- Home-cooking culture
- Fresher, lighter, less greasy food
Pizza Hut remained anchored to a format shaped by a different era.
9. Is There Still a Future for Thick or Pan-Style Pizza in Britain?
Thicker, heavier pizza hasn’t disappeared — but the places where it succeeds say a lot about how the category has shifted.
Little Caesars attempted a UK return in 2022 with a value-led, American fast-food model. It never gained real traction. Only two sites opened, and the Derby branch appears to have closed by October 2025, leaving Greenford as the last remaining unit. The pitch — cheap, heavy pan pizza as the main event — simply didn’t line up with what modern British customers now expect from either quality or convenience.
Meanwhile, the most consistently successful thick pizza in the UK is sold by Greggs. Their focaccia-style slices work because they’re framed as quick, filling snacks, not sit-down meals or “let’s go out for pizza” moments. They live alongside sausage rolls and bakes, not inside table-service restaurants.
This contrast is telling:
- Pan pizza works as a snack.
- It works as part of a wider food offer.
- It works in supermarkets and grab-and-go formats.
- It struggles when it’s asked to carry an entire dine-in brand on its own.
Thick pizza hasn’t died. What has died is the idea that thick pizza on its own can sustain a national restaurant estate built for a different era of British dining.
Pizza Hut is the last deep-pan chain standing — and that gave it just enough time to misunderstand what Britain really wanted next.