How to Figure Cost Per Square Inch of Pizza

With Little Caesar's, it used to be easy. Now that the biggest national square pizza franchise has gone belly-up, if you want to calculate pizza per square inch, you'll need to get your math cap on. Figuring the area of a circle is a little harder than working with polygons, so you'll need to use the math term represented by the Greek letter "pi" to figure out the size of your pizza pie.

Instructions

1. Take the diameter of your pizza. Sellers generally use diameter as a measure of your pizza size (or just small, medium, large).

2. Divide the diameter by two to get the radius. For a 12-inch diameter, for example, your radius will be 6 inches.

3. Calculate the area by using the standard math equation "pi r squared" where r is the radius. To do this, just square the radius (6 becomes 36) and then multiply your product by the value of "pi", which is 3.14.

4. Drop the decimals. Because pi is virtually endless, you'll never get a round number when using it in a calculation. Just stick to the first two decimal places.

5. Figure out your total cost when you have your final calculation of square inches (for our 12-inch pizza, it's 113.04 square inches). Add all taxes and delivery charges. You'll need to figure out how much your pizza costs, it's always different. Pizza is one commodity that is priced to sell.

6. Divide that cost by the number of square inches as you've calculated it. When you've got it, you can annoy mooching friends by telling them that their next bite is going to cost them, say 36 cents for the 1.15 square inches they are about to swallow.