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Pizza Pizza Royalty Corp. owns the Pizza Pizza and Pizza 73 brand trademarks and collects a royalty on every sale its restaurant franchisees make.
Pizza Pizza is one of Canada's best-known pizza chains, and it sells far more than pizza. Walk into a Pizza Pizza in Ontario or a Pizza 73 in western Canada and you'll find pizzas, chicken wings, panzerotti, and sides like garlic bread and dips, sold mostly to families ordering dinner, students grabbing a cheap slice, and offices feeding a crowd. The company is headquartered in Toronto.
The odd and important thing is that the publicly traded company does not run restaurants. Pizza Pizza Royalty Corp. owns the brand names and trademarks, and it licenses them to a separate operating company that actually operates and franchises the restaurants. In return, the royalty company collects a percentage of the restaurants' sales — a few cents on every dollar — no matter whether an individual location makes a profit. Locations first pay a royalty to the brand owner, then keep the rest to cover food, staff, rent, and hopefully a profit of their own. That structure makes the business a simple toll booth on pizza sales. Sales rise when the chain opens new locations or sells more per store, and the royalty pool grows with them. The catch is that the royalty company has little control over the restaurants themselves, and its fortunes rise and fall with the chain's sales, the price of cheese and other ingredients, and competition from giants like Domino's Pizza and Papa John's.
In late 1967, Michael Overs opened a single pizza shop at Wellesley and Parliament streets in Toronto. That original location is still running today, and it anchors the whole brand's history.
A few years later, Pizza Pizza made ordering simple with a single centralized phone number customers could remember. It also pioneered insulated delivery bags, early operational tricks that helped the chain spread across Ontario.
Pizza Pizza went public near the height of Canada's income trust era, but it did so as a royalty company. In plain terms, it collects a cut of the restaurants' sales and hands most of that cash to investors as monthly dividends, making it an income stock with a value tilt.
In 2007, the company agreed to buy Alberta-based Pizza 73, its vehicle for expanding into western Canada. The chain had already said at its IPO that it would consider buying existing local chains to grow outside Ontario.
Founder Michael Overs died in 2010, and his son-in-law Paul Goddard was named CEO of both the chain and the royalty company. Goddard has led it since, emphasizing its identity as one of the few large, national quick-service brands that is Canadian-owned.
In the 2020 COVID-19 crash, Pizza Pizza shares fell 42% from peak to trough, though they rebounded 47% from the March bottom. Same-store sales dipped 12.5% that year, and the company cut its monthly dividend to 5 cents.
In 2023, the chain opened the first of four planned outlets in Guadalajara, Mexico, its first international expansion. At home, the CEO sees room to reach between 1,000 and 1,200 stores.
By Q2 2026, same-store sales had fallen 5.0% from a year earlier as squeezed consumers traded down and hunted for deals. The company added 20 new restaurants to its royalty pool, 814 in all, but the new locations couldn't offset the sales decline. The dividend yield broke past 6.3% as the stock neared a 52-week low, raising questions about whether that payout can last.
Its most interesting trait is what it does with the cash. Because running restaurants isn't its job, it has little need to reinvest, so nearly all royalty income is paid out to shareholders as a monthly dividend. The company has also grown through acquisitions, adding the Pizza 73 brand to its royalty pool in 2016, then buying back the Pizza Pizza trademarks and the royalty it owed to an outside entity in 2020. For investors, it is less a pizza maker than a small, steady income stream tied to Canadians' appetite for delivery pizza.
Saved answer · last researched 4 Nov 2026