A Mathematical Equation That Explains Why You Should Always Buy a Larger Pizza
No, I’m not here on behalf of the evil Big Pizza lobby. According to simple math, if you buy several small pizzas instead of one large one, you are almost always wasting your money. This video breaks down this.
As you can see in the video above from ASAP Science, which has handy visuals, the amount of extra pizza you get when you increase the size is almost always out of proportion to its price. For example, an 8 “pizza contains about 50 square inches of pizza (excluding the pizza to crust ratio, which is an important culinary factor). However, a 16-inch pizza is not twice the size of a pizza as we might instinctively think. It’s actually four times that size, with 200 square inches of pizza. And yet, you will almost never find a pizza place where a small 8 “pizza is four times cheaper than a large 16” pizza.
We’ve touched on this concept before , but the visuals above help you understand it. You can also calculate your own pizza areas using a simple equation that you probably learned in high school and forgot.
A=πr2
In other words, the area of the pizza is equal to the square of the radius times pi. Just paste half of whatever size listed on the menu into this equation and you have your area. You can then compare the unit price to get the best deal. In almost all cases, you’ll find that a larger pizza is better, but hey, it doesn’t hurt to double-check the deal, right?
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