Americans' favorite pizza toppings, from pepperoni to spinach

Pizza crosses almost every regional, generational and economic line in the U.S., which makes topping preferences one of the clearest windows into how the country actually eats. Americans' favorite pizza toppings have barely moved in half a century. Pepperoni has led national rankings for decades, and the names right behind it — mushrooms, Italian sausage, onions, extra cheese — were just as familiar on a 1980s chain menu as they are on a delivery app today.

That stability is the real story. The pizza business has thrown an enormous amount of novelty at customers since the 1990s: Neapolitan-style blistered crusts, cauliflower bases, plant-based pepperoni, hot honey, barbecue and ranch sauce bases, stuffed and square and pan builds. Sales keep circling back to the same short list of savory, inexpensive, shelf-stable ingredients, at national chains and neighborhood pizzerias alike. Most of those toppings are not chosen alone, either. Black olives, green peppers and onions ride along on the supreme, a combination that has looked roughly the same on American menus since the 1970s.

A handful of toppings have genuinely gained ground. Bacon rode the broader fast food bacon boom onto specialty pies like barbecue chicken and bacon cheeseburger pizza. Spinach climbed along with white pizza, where olive oil, garlic and ricotta replace tomato sauce entirely. Ham's ranking rests almost entirely on the ham-and-pineapple Hawaiian, a pie that has survived decades of argument about whether fruit belongs on pizza.

This list covers 10 of the toppings Americans order most and explains why each one stays on the menu. Some earn their spot on flavor and texture, like pepperoni, which curls and crisps in the oven and releases fat that helps the cheese brown. Others survive on practicality — cost, shelf life, how much water they release during a bake. The slides that follow also cover how each topping is prepared and where the regional styles of Chicago, New York and Detroit handle it differently.

Illustration: Quartz

Pepperoni has been the most ordered pizza topping in the U.S. for decades, a lead no other ingredient has seriously threatened. It is a cured sausage of pork and beef, seasoned with paprika and chili for its red color and mild heat.

Texture explains much of the appeal. Cut thin and laid flat, natural-casing pepperoni curls upward at the rim in a hot oven as the edge contracts faster than the center. The curl leaves a crisp lip and a shallow well that fills with rendered orange fat, carrying paprika flavor across the cheese and browning the mozzarella in patches.

Pepperoni also works at every level of a menu. It carries a plain pepperoni pie on its own, anchors meat lovers and supreme builds, and sits next to mushrooms, onions or green peppers without overwhelming them.

The case for the kitchen is just as strong. Cured sausage keeps far longer than fresh produce, costs less per pizza than most other meats, needs no prep beyond slicing and requires no separate cooking step, unlike raw sausage or bacon. For a shop running hundreds of orders on a Friday night, that consistency counts for as much as flavor.

Regional styles handle it differently. Chicago deep dish stacks toppings over the cheese and finishes with chunky tomato sauce on top, so the pepperoni steams under the sauce rather than crisping. New York thin crust leaves the slices exposed through a short, very hot bake, which is where the curled edge and the pooled oil come from. Many Detroit-style pan pizzas use cup-style pepperoni that crisps hard near the caramelized cheese running up the edge of the pan.

Ordering patterns stay the same across all three. The format, the bake time and the placement change from city to city; the topping at the top of the list does not.

Illustration: Quartz

Mushrooms are the vegetable Americans order most on pizza, ranking among the top toppings overall on chain menus and delivery platforms. The appeal is an earthy, savory flavor that deepens under heat without competing with tomato sauce or mozzarella.

Most pizzerias use white button mushrooms. Cremini — the same species picked at a browner, firmer stage — appear where a kitchen wants a meatier bite. Both are mild enough to sit beside nearly any other ingredient on the pie.

Mushrooms are roughly 90% water, which creates the main technical problem with using them. Sliced raw and piled on, they release moisture into the cheese and can leave a soft gray patch on the crust. Kitchens slice them thin, sauté them first, or scatter fewer across the surface than a customer expects.

The pairings follow the flavor chemistry. Mushrooms carry free glutamate, the compound behind umami, and so do tomatoes and aged cheese. Stacking all three concentrates the effect, which is why mushroom tastes richer on a pizza than in most other dishes.

Mushroom rarely arrives by itself. It anchors the sausage-and-mushroom pie that sells heavily on Midwestern thin crust, turns up with green pepper on vegetarian builds, and holds a standing spot in the four-topping deluxe next to pepperoni and onion. Much of its ranking traces to that supporting work rather than to orders of mushroom alone.

Canned mushrooms were common on American pizza through the mid-20th century, when refrigerated produce distribution was patchier and shelf-stable ingredients suited a delivery kitchen. Fresh sliced mushrooms are standard now at chains and independents, though canned still appear on some budget menus and across the frozen pizza aisle.

More specialized varieties — shiitake, oyster, thick-sliced portobello caps — show up on wood-fired and white pizzas at independent shops, usually roasted before they go on the dough and priced as a premium addition rather than a default one.

Illustration: Quartz

Italian sausage is the meat topping most closely tied to one American city. In Chicago it anchors deep dish and the thin tavern-style pies cut into squares, and nationally it ranks just behind pepperoni among meat toppings. Its fennel-forward seasoning is what sets it apart.

Pizzerias use mild or hot Italian sausage, pulled from the casing and crumbled before it goes on the pie. Crumbling matters. Loose sausage browns at the exposed edges and leaves pockets of concentrated, fatty seasoning rather than the even coverage of a sliced cured meat. The fennel, garlic and black pepper in the grind cut through sweeter tomato sauces in a way plain ground beef does not.

Chicago deep dish treats sausage as a structural layer rather than a garnish. In the classic build, it goes over the cheese and under a chunky, barely cooked tomato sauce, sometimes as a single pressed patty spanning the whole pan. Some stuffed pizzas seal it between two sheets of dough. Thin-crust versions across the Midwest take the opposite approach, scattering crumbles across the top with green peppers and onions so the edges crisp in the oven.

Sausage is also a fixture of combination pizzas sold nationwide. It turns up on nearly every meat lovers and supreme build, usually alongside pepperoni, bacon or ham, where it supplies a coarser texture those pies would otherwise lack.

Preparation is where chains and independent shops diverge most. A national chain works from one standardized recipe, so a pie in Phoenix matches a pie in Pittsburgh. Neighborhood pizzerias often carry several versions — a heavy fennel grind, a hotter blend with red pepper flakes, sometimes a house mix from a local butcher or Italian grocer. That variation is why sausage is the topping regulars name when comparing one local shop to another, and why it has held its spot on American menus for decades.

Illustration: Quartz

Black olives hold their place among the most-ordered pizza toppings in the U.S. almost entirely through the supreme pizza, not through solo orders. The briny, faintly bitter flavor cuts against sweet tomato sauce and heavy mozzarella, which makes the topping a counterweight rather than a centerpiece.

American pizzerias nearly always use one specific product: canned, pitted ripe olives sliced into rings or half-moons. These are harvested before they ripen, cured in lye, then exposed to air so the flesh darkens to a uniform black before canning. The result is mild and far less salty than a Mediterranean table olive, and it tastes the same from can to can. That consistency matters more in a high-volume kitchen than the sharper, oilier character of a Kalamata. A brine-cured Greek olive would overwhelm the gentle, sugar-forward tomato sauce most U.S. chains use.

The supreme pizza locked the topping into the national rotation. By the 1970s and 1980s, a standard combination pie at a chain or a neighborhood shop meant pepperoni, sausage, mushrooms, onions, green peppers and olive rings. That lineup has barely been rewritten since. Anyone ordering a loaded pizza for a table is usually ordering black olives, whether or not they would ask for them alone.

Kitchen practicality helps. Olive slices carry almost no free water into a bake, so they do not steam the cheese or soften the crust the way wetter vegetables can. They go straight from the can to the pie with no trimming, precooking or draining, and they hold their shape and color through the heat of a pizza oven.

The upscale end of the market has moved elsewhere. Artisanal and Neapolitan-leaning menus reach for Castelvetrano, Kalamata or oil-cured olives, often left whole or halved and sometimes with the pit still in. Sliced ripe olives stay concentrated in chains and traditional neighborhood pizzerias, where a long run in the supreme combination keeps them among the most recognized toppings in the country.

Illustration: Quartz

Green bell peppers hold their texture through a pizza bake better than almost any other vegetable topping, which is the main reason they have stayed on American menus for decades. They leave the oven softened but still firm, with a faintly bitter, grassy flavor that cuts through melted mozzarella.

Pizzerias prepare them one of two ways: sliced into thin strips that drape across the pie, or diced into small squares that scatter evenly. Strips are the more common choice on chain pizzas and supreme-style pies, where the shape identifies the topping at a glance. Dicing suits a kitchen that wants pepper in every bite rather than clustered in a few.

That slight bitterness is what makes the pepper work in a combination rather than on its own. Set alongside Italian sausage, onions and pepperoni, it keeps a heavily meated pizza from tasting flat and offsets the sweetness of American-style tomato sauce. Those four ingredients form the backbone of the supreme, one of the most recognizable topping sets in U.S. pizzerias.

Peppers also release less moisture during a bake than mushrooms do, so a kitchen can load them on without soaking the crust. A slice keeps some snap even after a delivery drive, which matters on menus built around takeout.

Red, yellow and orange bell peppers turn up more often on specialty and gourmet pies, where the sweeter flavor and brighter color fit roasted-vegetable or Mediterranean builds. Green stays the default on standard menus largely on cost and supply. Green peppers are harvested before they ripen into their colored stage, which shortens time on the plant and keeps the price down.

Customers assembling vegetarian pizzas order green peppers with mushrooms, onions and black olives more than any other grouping. That cluster shows how fixed the American vegetable pizza has become. Artisanal pizzerias rotate produce by season, while the standard pizzeria menu runs on the same durable, predictable vegetables every month of the year, with the green bell pepper at the center.

Illustration: Quartz

Bacon moved from an occasional add-on to a standard specialty meat on American pizza menus over the past two decades. It got there through branded specialty pies, not by taking pepperoni's slot on a plain order. Smoke, salt and a crisp edge give it a role that cured Italian meats like pepperoni and salami do not fill.

The ingredient's pizza career tracks the wider bacon boom in U.S. fast food. Once bacon became a routine upgrade on burgers, chicken sandwiches and breakfast sandwiches, chains already had the supply chain and the customer expectation in place to move it onto a pizza. That is why bacon usually appears as a named component of a specific pie — bacon cheeseburger pizza, chicken bacon ranch, barbecue chicken with bacon crumbles — rather than as a box a customer checks on a cheese pizza.

Preparation explains part of how it behaves on a menu. Most pizzerias use pre-cooked bacon pieces or crumbles instead of raw strips. A standard pizza bake runs too short and too hot at the surface to render raw bacon evenly, and pre-cooking also drains off grease that would otherwise pool on the cheese and soften the crust.

Bacon also sits comfortably on the non-tomato sauce bases that national chains introduced during the 1990s and 2000s. Barbecue sauce suits its sweet-smoky profile, and ranch matches its salt with something cool and herby. On a tomato-sauce pizza, bacon is more often paired with grilled chicken, red onion or extra cheese than with the sausage-and-pepper combinations that define a supreme.

Texture explains the rest of its staying power. Pepperoni softens and curls in the oven and sausage stays moist and crumbly, but bacon keeps a snap through the bake. That contrast is what kept bacon on menus after the initial novelty passed, settling it alongside ham as a standard specialty meat rather than a passing trend.

Illustration: Quartz

Ham keeps its place among the most-ordered American pizza toppings almost entirely on the strength of one pie: the ham-and-pineapple Hawaiian. Outside that combination and the occasional meat lovers order, few customers add ham on its own.

Pizzerias generally use diced or cubed deli-style ham, already fully cooked, so the bake only has to heat it through. Some use Canadian bacon instead, a leaner cut taken from the loin rather than the belly. Either version is milder and less fatty than pepperoni or Italian sausage, with a cured, faintly sweet flavor and little rendered grease. That mildness is what makes the Hawaiian work. Ham sits under a sweet topping rather than competing with it, and kitchens usually drain the canned pineapple first so the crust does not turn soggy.

Hawaiian pizza has no historical link to Hawaii. Sam Panopoulos, a Greek-born restaurateur in Ontario, is widely credited with adding canned pineapple to a pizza at his Chatham restaurant in 1962. The name is generally traced to the brand of canned fruit he used. Panopoulos, who died in 2017, described the move as kitchen experimentation rather than a culinary statement. The pairing matched a mid-century North American taste for sweet-and-savory dishes.

Ham turns up on conventional meat combinations too, sharing a pie with bacon, sausage and pepperoni. There it works as a counterweight, offsetting the spice and fat of cured Italian meats with something softer and saltier.

The combination draws persistent public argument. Iceland's president, Guðni Th. Jóhannesson, set off an international round of it in 2017 after saying he would ban pineapple as a pizza topping if he could. He later clarified that the office carries no such authority. Chefs, diners and online commenters have argued the point since. Sales have been steadier than the debate suggests. Major national chains keep a ham-and-pineapple pizza on the standard menu, and that single item is what holds ham among the toppings Americans order most.