Craft-your-own-pizza chain Pieology Pizzeria has faced a steady decline of locations since its peak of about 150 independently owned restaurants in 2017, when it received investments from Panda Express founders Andrew and Peggy Cherng and NBA star Kevin Durant, Nation’s Restaurant News reported.
The pizzeria’s locations began a decline to 125 by 2019, 116 in 2021, and 103 in 2024. The pizza chain’s parent Little Brown Box Pizza LLC filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Dec. 8, 2025, after plummeting to 45 restaurants.
Pieology has closed over 120 locations since its peak and now has 27 in four states and Guam as of Oct. 9, 2026, according to the company website.
The pizza chain has a good product, but this writer no longer has a convenient location nearby after losing two local locations in California about six months apart. One location about a 10-minute drive in one direction closed in November 2024 and another about a 15-minute drive in another direction shut down in June 2025.
Pieology closes location, dumps lease
The pizza chain, which was established in 2011, most recently closed a location in October in the Folsom Gateway shopping plaza in the Sacramento suburb of Folsom, Calif., on Iron Point Road, the Sacramento Bee reported.
The restaurant’s owner, which opened the Pieology location in 2016, has not issued a statement about the closing. Kelly Rule, senior vice president of leasing at the restaurant’s landlord Pappas Investments, told the Bee that the Pieology franchisee chose not to renew its lease.
Pappas Investments is negotiating with another restaurant tenant for the former Pieology space, but the tenant has not yet signed a lease.
Sacramento still has a Pieology location in the Meadowview neighborhood and another nearby in the Elk Grove, Calif., suburb.
Pizza chains over-expanded
The “make-your-own-pizza” sector has no shortage of restaurants ready to create a pie for their customers. The competition is so fierce, however, that many of the chains discovered that they over-expanded and needed to close locations.
Mod Pizza, founded in 2008, is a leading chain that had about 575 locations at its peak in 2024, then it started reducing its footprint, TheStreet’s Daniel Kline reported.
Mod Pizza closed over 130 locations
The Bellevue, Wash.-based pizza chain has been downsizing over the last two years, closing about 137 restaurants since its peak, and it currently has 438 locations in 26 states, according to its store locator on its website on Oct. 10, 2026.
Atlanta-based Blaze Pizza has also been downsizing its footprint over the last two years. The chain, founded in 2012, had over 300 locations at the beginning of 2024 before closing 30 stores that year and followed up those closings with 36 more in 2025, according to Restaurant Dive.
The company currently has over 250 locations in 33 states and three countries.
Blaze, however, hired a new chief financial officer, Lucas Bravo, in June 2026 who said he would lead a company expansion.
“I look forward to partnering closely with the leadership team and franchise community to support Blaze Pizza’s next phase of innovation and expansion,” Bravo said in a statement.
