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At Pizza Hut, both the pizza and the brand are for sale.
Yum! Brands (YUM) — the owner of Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, and KFC — officially announced it was conducting a formal strategic review of options for Pizza Hut in November 2025. The process could include a sale of the iconic fast food pizza chain, which has close to 20,000 locations globally, and the review is set for completion by year-end.
“We do believe some bold news needs to be made,” Yum! Brands CEO Chris Turner said on Yahoo Finance’s Opening Bid Unfiltered podcast. “There’s likely going to need to be investment in the brand. There may need to be some ownership of stores. So there’s a lot of work to be done now. Some of those things are things that Yum! typically doesn’t do.”
“That’s why we’re exploring options where there may be some outside capital partners who could take on some of those types of strategies that could help get Pizza Hut get on the right trajectory,” Turner added. “And so that’s why we’re being pretty open in terms of exploring those options. We want to end up at the end of the day doing the right thing for the brand.”
The relationship between Yum! Brands and Pizza Hut is as close as pepperoni and cheese on a steaming hot pizza.
PepsiCo (PEP) purchased Pizza Hut in 1977 for approximately $300 million. At the time, Pizza Hut was the world’s largest pizza chain, and this move marked PepsiCo’s first foray into the restaurant industry.
Over the next decade, PepsiCo acquired Taco Bell (1978) and KFC (1986) to expand its restaurant portfolio.
In October 1997, PepsiCo decided to shift focus to its core beverage and snack businesses and spun off its restaurant division into a new public company called Tricon Global Restaurants. This went on to become what we know today as Yum! Brands.
But the fast food business has changed considerably through the years, and Pizza Hut’s performance has lagged.
In 2025, Pizza Hut’s US sales fell by 5%, while Taco Bell’s same-store sales rose by 7%.
Competitors in the pizza industry, like Domino’s Pizza (DPZ), have aggressively taken market share through frequent promotions and have leaned hard into mobile ordering.
Meanwhile, the world of food delivery by way of Uber Eats (UBER) and Grubhub has opened up a world of eating possibilities, whereas pizza delivery dominated for decades.
“We are supportive of a sale, as it would remove a key source of underperformance risk and should increase confidence in steadier growth,” Stifel analyst Chris O’Cull said.
