Boss of pizza chain admits prices are too high
When customers complained to a pizza chain that it was too expensive, you'd think the boss would fight back. But Mike Burns, CEO of &pizza, agreed, and yesterday he slashed prices and simplified the menu to win back diners. The chain, known for its oblong pies and bold branding, has dropped the price of its pizzas with unlimited toppings from to a flat $12.
That's a drop from the previous $12.99 for specialty pies, plus $1.50 for each topping — or $13.99 for a build-your-own option that only included a few free toppings before extra charges kicked in. 'The restaurant industry has been nickeling and diming customers for years - including us,' Burns told DailyMail.com. 'We are stopping that. This is a permanent pricing strategy.'
'Previously one of our pies that was listed at $12.99 is significantly more expensive once you add additional toppings at $1.50 each. So in reality a $12.99 American Honey with, say mushrooms, was $14.49.' Knots, drinks, and cookies also got cheaper. Besides lowering prices, &pizza, which has stores in Washington DC, Maryland, Virginia, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, announced its plans to begin franchising in March.
Customers who walk into a store may notice its knots side option costing $6. Before the changes, the chain's knots were offered at various prices typically ranging between $5.99 and $6.49. 'Our knot pricing was also all over the place and I couldn't tell you a good reason why — so now they are all $6,' Burns told DailyMail.com. Their cookies are now available to purchase for $1, a 50 percent decrease from its original price.
'We were selling them for $3.49, and 'selling' was a loose term, because nobody's buying a cookie for $3.49,' the CEO revealed. The company opted to expand its price decreases for both beverages and food. While keeping the $3.49 Coca-Cola price tag, &pizza decided to bring other canned sodas down to $2. Besides price dips, &pizza introduced a $7 half cheese pie and a drink combo meal, designed to increase foot traffic. Founded in 2012, &pizza aims to have 300 units by 2030.
Its popularity in the East has inspired the chain to look into franchising locations in the DMV and Mid-Atlantic regions. 'The ampersand stands for unity and bringing communities together, and we feel like in order to do that, the owner of those restaurants has to live in those communities,' Burns told QSR . 'So if we're going to develop in El Paso, Texas, or Tallahassee, Florida, or Charlotte, North Carolina, the person should live in that market because they know the people, they know the area.' Burns credited the chain's franchising process as one of the reasons why they explored the possibility of price drops.
'We've had dozens of discovery days with potential franchisees, and across each a common question has been 'can we reduce pricing?' Or 'your pricing structure is too high.' So we listened,' Burns explained. There are no plans to open restaurants on the West Coast anytime soon, but the process itself has been moving faster than expected. 'It just shows that there's passion for the brand. We feel we're different than normal fast-casual pizza, but we hope that the people out there see that potential to grow their personal wealth,' the CEO added. &pizza's cost decrease comes after restaurant chains hiked prices for reasons such as inflation and tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump.
The financial strains have also taken a toll on business owners, including a Pizza Hut franchisee who put 127 restaurants up for sale last year . A &pizza competitor, Pizza Hut has suffered financial hits over the years and its same store sales shrank by 2 percent in the first three months of 2025. Several fast casual restaurants who weren't at risk of closures were found to have significantly raised prices over the last 5 years. Experts discovered that Waffle House increased prices by 96 percent . Its competition has also been financially strong, including CAVA, a Mediterranean 'Chipotle' set to open between 62 and 66 US locations this year.
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Among Kennedy's many claims: that vaccines cause autism; that psychiatric drugs cause mass shootings; that HIV is not the cause of Aids and instead it's due to recreational drug use. He has said Covid was 'targeted to attack caucasians and Black people' and argued that exposure to pesticides is a cause of gender dysphoria. In early May, during a televised town hall, he claimed, without evidence, that Darpa, the US Defence Department's research and development arm, is spraying Americans with chemicals via jet fuel, reviving long-debunked 'chemtrail' conspiracy theories. He has also made controversial statements about raw milk and fluoride in drinking water (Florida governor Ron DeSantis just signed a bill banning the addition of fluoride to public water supplies, making Florida only the second state to outlaw a practice long considered a cornerstone of public health). Since taking office, Kennedy has fired 10,000 staffers – before admitting some programmes were mistakenly cut and would be reinstated. A couple of weeks back, he appeared before Congress to ask for less money for the agency, planning drastic cuts in line with Trump's agenda. Like Kennedy, Casey Means is sceptical about vaccine safety and calls for more research on their cumulative effects, despite there being no evidence that the current Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) schedule is unsafe. Timothy Caulfield is a health law and science policy professor at the University of Alberta in Canada, and an expert in debunking pseudoscience in wellness culture. He is convinced the Maha movement at the centre of the US government will do harm for generations to come. 'Their erosion in trust in scientific institutions is tremendously damaging,' Caulfield says. 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While Kennedy seems to have made a volte-face on vaccinations, acknowledging recently that they are the best way to avoid spreading measles, he has also downplayed the seriousness of infections, actions experts see as damaging confidence in vaccines. The roots of this scepticism lie with former British doctor Andrew Wakefield. Wakefield was struck off the UK medical register after his 1998 paper suggesting a link between the MMR vaccine and autism sparked a major health scare. I interviewed Wakefield some years ago and he remained defiant, despite his discredited idea that there's an autism-vaccine link. His distrust of the medical establishment has found a new platform in Maha. Caulfield adds that having people who trained as medical doctors can make the movement seem more legitimate. He points to Dr Mehmet Oz, a TV staple of American daytime television, who Trump recently nominated as the administrator for Medicare and Medicaid, government programmes that provide health insurance for pensioners and people on low incomes. 'Dr Oz almost made it noble to open your mind to embracing fringe ideas and disproven ideas,' Caulfield says. Oz has promoted the antimalarial hydroxychloroquine as a cure for Covid. If Kennedy, Means and Dr Oz are the political wing of the Maha movement, the 'crunchy mums' are its foot soldiers. A loosely defined but increasingly vocal group, they're just as likely to be found on Instagram as in a food co-op, posting about raw milk, cloth diapers, or the dangers of seed oils. But what began as a subculture rooted in environmentalism and food equity has morphed into a more politicised movement that blends wellness, parental autonomy, and deep mistrust of mainstream medicine. And Kennedy is their leader. His anti-establishment rhetoric against Big Pharma, food additives, and what he sees as the corrupt medical-industrial complex, has found fertile ground among mothers who feel dismissed or ridiculed by conventional health authorities. For them, it's about reasserting control over their families' health in a system they no longer trust. Kennedy speaks their language and validates their deepest fears. But his critics warn of the real-world consequences of promoting medical misinformation. Jonathan Jarry is a science communicator with McGill University's Office for Science and Society. He says RFK is part of a much larger wellness movement that has, for many years now, told people what they should blame for their health problems. 'Basically, modernity itself has been turned into the bogeyman,' Jarry says. 'Everything that screams modernity, like pesticides and food dyes and even vaccines. Anything that your grandma didn't have access to.' But, Jarry says, there's always a kernel of truth buried inside the messaging from Maha – that's what makes it so effective. Of course, there are issues with ultra-processed foods. And so when people hear RFK and other Maha leaders identify a problem, it often has a ring of truth to it. 'People say, 'Finally he's talking about this thing we knew was bad,'' Jarry says. 'But the problem is that the solution they're offering is completely wrong. That's what happens when you have somebody who says, 'I see your pain and I know what's causing it; I know what we can blame for this, so follow me and together we will enact the right solutions even when those solutions are completely pseudo-scientific.'' Jarry says we know what it takes to be healthy, and none of this is revolutionary. Of course, there's a kernel of truth in the idea that corporations don't necessarily have our best interests at heart. 'But [Kennedy] will demonise the entire pharmaceutical industry and anybody who works in health regulation or vaccine development. And that can be appealing to people looking at these giant institutions that are raking in millions and millions of dollars, thinking there's something wrong there.' Dr Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine and an expert on vaccines, told Mother Jones magazine that he was deeply concerned that the vaccine ecosystem 'could collapse and we could see polio in the wastewater and the return of regular measles and pertussis outbreaks'. Jarry says he shares Hotez's fear. 'I think that it is very likely that we're going to see a resurgence of vaccine-preventable illnesses. We're already seeing what's happening with measles and there's going to be more. And unfortunately, these diseases don't stop at the border. And so there will be ripple effects on other countries throughout the world. 'Add to that the complete evisceration of the biomedical research funding apparatus in the United States … and [I think] we're going to go backwards to a time when these infections were spreading routinely and people are going to suffer and die for no good reason. And this is what's really horrifying.'
