| Type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Restaurants |
| Founded | Garden City, Michigan, U.S. (May 8, 1959) |
| Founder(s) | Michael Ilitch Marian Ilitch |
| Headquarters | Detroit, Michigan, United States |
| Area served | Worldwide |
| Key people | Michael Ilitch (Owner) Marian Ilitch (Owner) David Scrivano (President) |
| Products | Pizza |
| Parent | Little Caesar Enterprises, Inc. |
| Website | www.littlecaesars.com |
Little Caesars is a pizza chain, estimated to be the 4th largest in the United States.[1] The Little Caesars headquarters is located in the Fox Theatre building in Downtown Detroit, Michigan.[2]
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Little Caesars Pizza was founded by Michael and Marian Ilitch on May 8, 1959. The first location was a strip mall in Garden City, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. Mike wanted to call it simply "Pizza Treat," but Marian wanted a name that suited Mike. Marian considered Mike her "little Caesar". Mike ultimately relented, and the store opened as "Little Caesar's Pizza Treat." The original store is still open today.
The company is famous for its advertising catchphrase, "Pizza! Pizza!" which was introduced in 1979. The phrase refers to two pizzas being offered for the comparable price of a single pizza from competitors. Originally the pizzas were served in a single long package. In addition to pizza, they served hot dogs, chicken, shrimp, and fish. Little Caesars has discarded the unwieldy packaging in favor of typical pizza boxes. Currently, the chain is best known for its "Hot-N-Ready" pizzas, large pizzas with popular toppings. Crazy Bread, eight bread sticks covered in garlic spread and Parmesan cheese, is also a staple item on their menu and a popular side-dish.
On November 1, 2010, Little Caesars introduced Pizza! Pizza! Pantastic, denying that the return of "Pizza! Pizza!" had any relationship to the recent success of Domino's, plus they deliver at some locations. [3]
Ilitch Holdings, Inc. provides professional and technical services to all companies owned by Mike Illitch. These include the Detroit Red Wings of the National Hockey League, Detroit Tigers of Major League Baseball, Detroit's MotorCity Casino, Blue Line Foodservice Distribution, Little Caesars Pizza Kits, Champion Foods, Olympia Entertainment, Olympia Development, Uptown Entertainment, and the Hockeytown Cafe (also the site of City Theater) and numerous other restaurants downtown and Fox Theatre in downtown Detroit.[4] In 2005, combined revenues of Ilitch-owned businesses totaled $2 billion.[5]
The company is looking to expand again, especially in the Northeast U.S. Currently, there are thousands of locations. In particular, Little Caesars wanted to return to markets that the chain was forced to withdraw from in the late 1990s due to financial troubles such as Pittsburgh, Minneapolis-St. Paul and Denver.
In 2006, the Little Caesars franchise returned to the Twin Cities Market, opening up stores in such busy corners as University Avenue and Snelling Avenue in Midway, Saint Paul, and Lake Street and Hiawatha Avenue, nearby the Midtown light rail station in the Phillips community of Minneapolis and other high foot traffic and or low income sections of the Twin Cities. Caesars also began a return to the competitive Pittsburgh market with the opening of new locations in Belle Vernon, Carnegie, Dormont, White Oak, West View, North Versailles, Uniontown, Canonsburg, and nearby New Castle, Pennsylvania. A new location also opened in the Pittsburgh suburb of Whitehall on 29 September 2009, and one in Pittsburgh's upwardly mobile Shadyside neighborhood opened May 15, 2010.[6] but by the middle of 2011, changes were made to move the snelling location to a more "poorer neighborhood" to just off west 7th ave, to keep its roots with low income customers.
By 1987[7] the company was operating across the Northern United States; by 2006 it was also present in parts of Canada (although some Canadian cities had locations since 1969), Puerto Rico, Guam, South Korea, Honduras, Slovakia,[8] the Dominican Republic, Czech Republic,[9] Mexico, Turkey, Ecuador, Egypt, Aruba, Iceland, Guatemala, Curaçao, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, El Salvador, Qatar, Venezuela, UAE, Lebanon, Bahrain and Peru. In 2004, Little Caesars began to sell Hot and Ready pizzas that are available without an order and with no wait. In 2007, Little Caesars ended its partnership with Coca-Cola, opting for Pepsi products instead, except in Canada.
Throughout the 1990s, Little Caesars was commonly found in Kmart stores. Coincidentally, the first Kmart and the first Little Caesars were both built in Garden City, Michigan. After Kmart's bankruptcy issues, most of today's Kmarts have replaced the Little Caesars with their own branded "K-Cafe". However, some Little Caesars remain. Little Caesars pizza are also included in many remodeled Kmart locations re-branded as Sears Grand or Sears essentials.
Today, Little Caesars is the fastest-growing pizza chain in the world.[10]
While Little Caesars owns the "Pizza! Pizza!" trademark in the U.S., the unaffiliated Pizza Pizza restaurant chain owns the Canadian trademark. As a result, Little Caesars cannot directly use its well-known slogan in Canada, but has used "Two Pizzas!" along with "Delivery! Delivery!", "Quality! Quality!" or other such double-word tag lines in advertising and on packaging in Canada. Little Caesars was among the first to use a new kind of speed cooking conveyor oven, the "Rotary Air Impingement Oven" as described in U.S. Patent 5676044 .
In 1998, Little Caesars filled what was then the current largest pizza order, filling an order of 13,386 pizzas from the VF Corporation of Greensboro, North Carolina.[11]
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