The Failed McDonald's Item Meant To Compete With Pizza Hut And Domino's

McDonald's has a long list of discontinued items. Many of them we honestly don't miss at all, but some have remained a nostalgic memory for those who partook in them — or, an intriguing concept for those who didn't. One such example is the infamous McPizza. In the 1980s, McDonald's restaurants got a lot of traffic for breakfast and lunch, but dinner service was slower. As pizza chains were growing in popularity, McDonald's tried to win over more customers by leaning into the pizza market, positioning itself as a direct competitor to Pizza Hut and Domino's. Given that there's no pizza on the McDonald's menu today, you can imagine how well that experiment went.

Initially, McPizza wasn't really a pizza, as much as it was a hybrid of hot pocket and a calzone. The product didn't really catch on, and neither did the name, so both were promptly changed. By 1987, the chain had switched to a standard, round pizza, simplistically renamed to McDonald's Pizza. Back then, $20 got you far at McDonald's, and both a plain pie and one with toppings initially cost less than $1. The menu eventually expanded to include four pizza flavors in two different sizes. The pies were served at hundreds of locations nationwide, as well as in Canada. "This is one of my fondest food memories ... we went back every week til it was discontinued," reminisced someone on Reddit.

Although McPizza was reportedly delicious, there were a lot of flaws in the execution that ultimately spelled its doom. For one, McDonald's was testing McSoup around the same time, a homestyle menu item that customers were quite torn over. For a fast-food, burger-forward chain, McDonald's was dipping its toes into several new territories at once; territories that didn't really align with the brand it had built thus far. The pizza's took significantly longer to make than any other menu item, even though the chain invested in special, speedy ovens. The whole process took longer than what the customers were used to at McDonald's, which ended up being the biggest dealbreaker.

The pizzas were ultimately removed from the menus across the States by the late '90s, although two locations in Ohio and West Virginia continued to serve them until 2017, when the practice became forbidden by McDonald's Corporate. As of 2026, there remains one single McDonald's location in America where you can order pizza — the world's largest McDonald's, which has anything but a typical fast food menu. People seem to like the pizza, but funnily enough, the wait for it has remained unusually long.