Little Caesars

Little Caesars
Type	Subsidiary of Ilitch Holdings
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	Ilitch Holdings
Website	www.littlecaesars.com

Fox Theatre, where the headquarters of Little Caesars is located.

Little Caesars is a pizza chain, estimated to be the fourth largest in the United States.^[1]^[2] The Little Caesars headquarters is located in the Fox Theatre building in Downtown Detroit, Michigan.^[3]

History[edit]

Little Caesars Pizza was founded by husband and wife Mike 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 her more. 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.

In 1998, Little Caesars filled what was then the largest pizza order, filling an order of 13,386 pizzas from the VF Corporation of Greensboro, North Carolina.^[4]

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 .

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.^[5]

Corporate[edit]

Franchise in Marquette, Michigan.

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.^[6] In 2005, combined revenues of Ilitch-owned businesses totaled $2 billion.^[7]

The company is looking to expand again, especially in the Northeast U.S.. It would also like to return to markets 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, low income sections of the Twin Cities. But later in 2011, for reasons unknown, the Snelling location moved from an upscale area, to a lower income, "poorer" area, fulfilling their practice of catering to low income areas. Domino's has since filled this location. 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, Norristown, and 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.^[8]

International growth[edit]

Little Caesars Pizza Station in Brno, Czech Republic

By 1987^[9] the company was operating across the Northern United States, purchasing the Mother's Pizza chain out of receivership in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom in 1989.^[10] 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,^[11] the Dominican Republic, Czech Republic,^[12] 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, as of June 1, 2012 Pepsi is now available 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.^[13]

Trademark in Canada[edit]

While Little Caesars owns the "Pizza! Pizza!" trademark in the U.S., the unaffiliated Pizza Pizza restaurant chain, founded on New Year's Eve Day in 1967 (a dozen years before Little Caesars began using their trademarked version in the United States) 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.