Little Caesars Bets $6.99 on Garlic Across Sauce and Crust

Little Caesars has put a $6.99 price tag on its newest limited-time offer, a Cheesy Garlic Pepperoni pizza that carries garlic in both the sauce and the crust, available at participating locations through Dec. 27.

That's the headline number, and it lands squarely in the value territory the Detroit-based chain has built its identity around. The LTO isn't a quiet menu addition, either. It arrives with a national advertising campaign starting Nov. 9, fronted by San Francisco 49ers tight end George Kittle.

What's actually on the pizza?

The build starts with a large round pizza topped with a cheesy garlic white sauce, mozzarella cheese and pepperoni, finished with garlic herb seasoning and a toasted garlic Parmesan and Asiago crust. Garlic shows up twice, in other words — in the base sauce and baked into the dough's finish.

That double placement is the point. According to Technomic, garlic is showing signs of growing relevance as a base flavor, and Little Caesars is positioning the ingredient as a platform rather than a one-off topping.

The strategy shows in the wider lineup. Three additional Cheesy Garlic varieties are also available:

• Cheesy Garlic Cheese
• Cheesy Garlic Bacon & Ham
• Cheesy Garlic Mushroom & Onion

Pepperoni and cheese versions can be ordered with the classic red sauce instead, which gives operators a familiar fallback and gives the menu board a garlic-forward flavor architecture without abandoning the core product.

Who said what

Chief Marketing Officer Greg Hamilton framed the launch as a balance between the proven and the new. "Pepperoni pizza will always be a favorite, but our guests are also looking for new flavors and more variety," Hamilton said in a statement. "Cheesy Garlic Pepperoni gives them the best of both worlds."

How the $6.99 price works operationally

The pizza will be sold as a Hot-N-Ready item, available from 4 to 8 p.m. local time, and can also be ordered online or through the Little Caesars app. That matters. Hot-N-Ready is the chain's no-wait, no-order-ahead counter model, so the LTO slots into the daypart where dinner rush volume is concentrated — the hours when speed of service and a single compelling price point drive transactions.

An LTO priced under $7 for a large pizza is a classic traffic play: thin per-unit economics in exchange for volume and trial, with a hard Dec. 27 expiration that creates urgency and a clean exit if the item doesn't hold.

The NFL machine behind the launch

The Kittle campaign isn't a standalone celebrity buy. Little Caesars kicked off its fifth season as an NFL sponsor in August, recruiting Kittle, Minnesota Vikings wide receiver Justin Jefferson and Detroit Lions quarterback Jared Goff to appear in promotions throughout the season. The chain became the NFL's Official Pizza Sponsor in 2022.

The launch campaign pairs what the company describes as Kittle's "larger-than-life personality" with the "big flavor" of the new pizza — a message built for national TV and social cutdowns during the heart of the football calendar.

What does this change for the pizza category?

Not the price war — Little Caesars never left it. What's newer is the flavor framing. Technomic's read on garlic as a rising base flavor suggests suppliers and chains alike will keep pushing savory, aromatic bases into mass-market pizza, where differentiation has historically come from price and speed rather than ingredients.

For a value chain, layering garlic into sauce and crust is cheap menu engineering: it changes the product's identity without changing its cost structure much. Expect the other Cheesy Garlic varieties to serve as the real test of whether garlic is a platform or a one-season stunt, with the Dec. 27 cutoff offering the first hard data point.