How much does it cost to make a pizza today?

As of September 2, 2026, the market-priced ingredients of a large cheese pizza cost about $1.35: three-quarters of a pound of cheese at $1.62/lb (CME block print), the flour in the dough at $7.69/bu wheat, and the deck-oven gas at $2.95/MMBtu. Add roughly $4.60 of labor, rent share, sauce, and box, and a $16.00 pie carries a 62.8% margin. Over the past month that margin moved down 0.6 points — Cheese +6.2% did most of it.

$1.35market ingredients $5.95all-in / pizza 62.8%margin at $16 23%of cost priced by markets

Your dough, your cheese blend, your menu price → your margin, live →

Cheese is the whole story

Of the $1.35 market bill, cheese is $1.22 — mozzarella is priced off the CME block-cheese market, and at three-quarters of a pound per large pie it dwarfs everything else. Flour is pennies: a large dough ball uses about half a pound, and even a violent wheat move barely reaches the pie. When a pizzeria's food cost creeps up, the block print is almost always why — which is why this page tracks it daily instead of quoting last year's averages.

What oil does and doesn't do to a pizza

Unlike a trucking mile, a pizza is barely oil-exposed: in the spring blockade window the modeled margin here moved from 62.8% to only 61.9%. The barrel reaches a pizzeria indirectly — delivery fuel, the gas under the deck oven, the diesel in the flour truck — but the block-cheese market moves on milk supply and export demand, not on Hormuz. That is the honest read: a fuel crisis squeezes your delivery economics, not your food cost.

Method

Prices are live futures/wholesale prints (CME cash-settled cheese, CBOT wheat, Henry Hub gas), updated continuously on our pipeline; your invoice adds distributor margin and basis but tracks the change. The recipe (0.75 lb cheese, ~0.55 lb flour) and the $4.60 fixed line are editable defaults — the margin card recomputes on your real numbers in the browser. Not an invoice forecast, not advice.