How much does it cost to make a pizza today?

As of October 22, 2026, the market-priced ingredients of a large cheese pizza cost about $1.20: three-quarters of a pound of cheese at $1.45/lb (CME block print), the flour in the dough at $6.29/bu wheat, and the deck-oven gas at $2.77/MMBtu. Add roughly $4.60 of labor, rent share, sauce, and box, and a $16.00 pie carries a 63.7% margin. Over the past month that margin moved up 0.6 points — Cheese -7.2% did most of it.

$1.20market ingredients $5.80all-in / pizza 63.7%margin at $16 21%of cost priced by markets

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

Cheese is the whole story

Of the $1.20 market bill, cheese is $1.09 — 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 63.7% to only 62.9%. 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.