Do Pizza Chains Veer Male?

As most fans of the blog know, I like pizza. 

Tonight I was getting into a 1/2 and 1/2 BBQ Chicken/Tuscan Chicken pie from a local chain out here called Mary's Pizza Shack when I realized how rare it was to see a pizza chain with a feminine name.

So I looked up the Wikipedia page on US Pizza chains and went through the 50 pizza chains with more than 50 locations. To my bemusement there are 12 pizza chains with "male" names, 38 with ungendered names, and exactly 0 with "female" names.

If it was just an Italian name I wasn't immediately sure of (Imo's pizza, Saprino's Pizzeria, Monical's Pizza) I gave it a pass.

Here are the 12 that were for sure male:

Hunt Brothers Pizza

Little Caesars *(While I knew Caesar is a dude, I also relied on the fact that the mascot has substantial chest hair)

Papa John's Pizza

Papa Murphy's

Marco's Pizza

Chuck E. Cheese

Godfather's Pizza

Hungry Howie's Pizza

Mountain Mike's Pizza

Peter Piper Pizza

Papa Gino's

Lou Malnati's Pizzeria

It got me thinking if there were other food types that were as gendered. It seems that baking mixes are mostly female (Sarah Lee, Betty Crocker), but you also have Duncan Hines and (while missing genitalia) the Pillsbury Doughboy. Given the large number of pizza chains, I would argue that pizza brands are more heavily associated with male names than any other foodtype brands.

I wonder why that is. Essentially making pizza is more akin to baking (with it's host of female brands) than anything else. So why are there no large female pizza chains? Is it some Italian heritage where the men make the pizza and that's held over for a century in the minds of the public that would scoff at the idea of eating a pizza with a women's name on the box? Are more dudes working in pizzerias and therefore more likely to start their own chain of pizzerias?

Who really knows, but I can tell you Mary's Pizza Shack was excellent, and I'd say it's second best of the 8 "male" pizza places on the list that I've tried.

 

Movin' to the country

After 7 fantastic years in San Diego we decided to move to Davis, CA. We loved living in San Diego where we had a wonderful house in a wonderful neighborhood. But with 2 kids we were starting to outgrow our house and after 9 months of teleworking I was able to convince my bosses that I could do my job remotely. So we decided to sell our house and move.

It really was a bit of a perfect situation. Carly and her brother co-own the property she grew up on, and her brother's family was living in the house (the one she grew up in), but they had decided to move into town, and so the house was available for us to live in. So a few days after they moved out, we moved in. 

The new view from my office

We're now living on 29 acres just a few miles south of Davis and we're planning to spend the rest of our lives here. The property has a horse stable and an orchard with lots of fruit and nut trees. There are 4 barns and plenty of old cars and trucks on the property that I'm dying to get back into working order. But with so many projects and so little time, I'm not sure when I'll be able to do any of them. We also have dreams of building a new house that suits us on the property and possibly starting a wedding venue on the site someday (we had our wedding here).

It was a dream that was a long time coming to move back here. There is a sense of security knowing that you're where you want to be long term. In San Diego we always had in the back of our minds that we would eventually sell our house and so many things we did were for the impact to the "resale value". But it's freeing to know that anything we do here, we do for ourselves and not a potential buyer.

Carly collecting pecans out in the Orchard

Blogging might be light in the future (happy 14th b-day to the blog btw) with the amount of work we need to do, but it feels like were finally chasing a dream we've had and that feeling is terrifically breathtaking. It's hard to describe the feeling of looking out across a big field and knowing that it's yours and the only limitation that you have is your imagination and willingness to work hard to make it what you want it to be.