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Little Caesars began on May 8, 1959, when Mike and Marian Ilitch opened Little Caesar’s Pizza Treat in a Garden City, Michigan strip mall, selling hot dogs, chicken, subs, shrimp and fish alongside pizza. The first franchise opened in Warren in 1962. In 1979 the Pizza Pizza campaign offered two pizzas for about the price of one pizza from competitors, packed side by side on a long cardboard sheet inside a stapled paper sleeve, a format that lasted until square Pan Pan pizzas brought standard boxes in 1988. The chain grew into the third largest pizza company in the United States, behind Domino’s and Pizza Hut.

The 1980s and 1990s brought experiments: former Chuck E. Cheese’s locations became Little Caesars Family Fun Pizzerias and then Caesarland arcades, which ran until 2011, and outlets opened inside Kmart stores. In Canada the chain cannot say Pizza Pizza, a trademark held by another company. In 1997 it introduced sign spinners and the $5 Hot-N-Ready large pepperoni, made possible by conveyor-driven air impingement ovens that cook every pizza the same way. Abroad, it left Russia in 2022, opened and then closed UK stores by 2026, quit Singapore in 2024, and entered the UAE in 2025 and Malaysia in 2026.

• In 1998 the chain filled an order of 13,386 pizzas for VF Corporation in Greensboro, North Carolina.
• Pizza by the Foot, a three-foot pizza from 1996, was dropped in the United States but sells as Pizza by the Meter in Saudi Arabia.
• Crazy Bread arrived in 1982, a Detroit-style Deep!Deep! Dish in 2013, and Crazy Puffs in Canada in 2023 and the U.S. in 2024.
• As of 2021, two Kmart locations survived, one in Guam and one in the U.S. Virgin Islands.
• The 2017 mascot update removed Caesar’s chest hair and hid the letters LC in his toga.