Is Costco's Pizza Always Made Fresh In The Food Court?

People might not be divided over whether Costco or Sam's Club has the better hot dog, but they are fairly split over who serves up the better pizza. Still, Costco's pizza is a beloved food court item, a favorite among customers, and a well-earned snack after a long slog through a busy store, pushing an increasingly heavy cart. While Costco pizza can be ordered ahead of time, you might be wondering — is it always made fresh? If you were worried its pies are pulled from a freezer whole before baking, worry no more: Costco's pizzas are indeed made up from soft, stretched dough, with sauce and fresh toppings applied each time.

Even better, as soon as a pizza (or the pieces from it) has been out of the oven for an hour, it gets replaced with a new, hot, and fresh pie, while the old one likely gets tossed. This means that at any point during Costco's operating hours, when you hit up the food court for a whole pizza — or just a slice — you're walking away with an item that was made less than an hour ago, and if you're lucky, only a few moments after being pulled from the oven.

While the warehouse chain does make its pizzas from fresh ingredients, Costco can't claim that its pizzas are scratch-made, because it does have its dough shipped in (versus made from flour, water, oil, etc., in stores). The supplier? According to one Reddit user, it's Lamonica's Pizza Dough International, Inc., which has locations in California, New York, and Italy.

The dough balls are delivered to stores each day, where they get proofed (given time to rest and rise) at the start of the day. It used to be that employees would slather a layer of olive oil onto the dough before further processing, but it appears that now the dough arrives pre-oiled by Lamonica instead. They get partially hand-stretched, then placed in a machine that flattens them to a specific thickness before being pulled off and placed on a perforated metal sheet. The employee then fits the circle of dough to the sheet and runs over it with a dough docker before the sauce is applied.

If you've got a taste for Costco pizza (and a big freezer), you can actually order Lamonica pizza dough online through Costco's Business Center website. A box comes with 21 individual dough balls.

No matter where you go in the country, when you pick up pizza at Costco ($1.99 for a mega-slice, or just $9.95 for an entire 18-inch pie), you can count on it being pretty much exactly the same, in flavor and appearance — including how much sauce, cheese, and pepperoni each disc gets. Part of the reason for this is that portions of the pizza-making process at Costco are actually automated.

The dough press ensures each pizza's crust is the exact same thickness, but the real star of the show is the sauce applicator. It looks like a record player, with the flattened-out dough spinning on a turntable as the arm of the machine dispenses sauce from the outside in. It's pretty neat stuff. Then there's the mesmerizing way Costco food court employees slice the pizza for uniform pieces every time: They use a pizza cutting guide (or fence). It looks like a metal asterisk, with space between the doubled-up metal rods for the pizza cutter to glide through.

Finally, there are guides posted in the food court kitchens describing how much cheese and pepperoni each pizza should get. Cheese pizzas obviously get more of the mozzarella and parmesan mixture, while the pepperoni is applied in a 4-3-2-1 inverted pyramid shape, six times on each pie, for a total of 60 pieces of pepperoni — no more and no less.