Pizza Pizza Brand Guidelines: The Toronto Chain Built on 967-11-11

One Toronto corner, New Year’s Eve 1967.

Pizza Pizza began on a single Toronto street corner. English Wikipedia says the chain was founded by Michael Overs, who opened the first location on 31 December 1967 at the corner of Wellesley and Parliament streets, in the east of the city’s downtown. The company still dates itself the same way: its own “About us” page opens with “Proudly Canadian since 1967” and calls the chain “100% Canadian.” blogTO, in a 2024 look back at the brand by Ed Conroy, also calls the Parliament and Wellesley shop its “landmark first store.”

Growth came in rings around that corner. English Wikipedia says the chain spread across the Toronto area in the 1970s and through the rest of Ontario in the 1980s and 1990s. Its first move into Quebec, in the mid-1980s, did not last, and it withdrew after a few years; it returned in March 2007 with a restaurant in Gatineau, and opened in the Montreal boroughs of Notre-Dame-de-Grâce and Pierrefonds-Roxboro later that year.

The 2000s took the chain further from home. English Wikipedia says that filings for its 2005 public offering raised the idea of moving into western Canada, possibly by buying local chains, and that this led to the 2007 agreement to buy Alberta’s Pizza 73. A first push into British Columbia’s Lower Mainland in 2009 closed, Manitoba and Saskatchewan followed, and the chain returned to Vancouver in 2018. Its first Halifax restaurant opened in June 2010, its first in New Brunswick, at Dieppe, in late 2021, and its first in Newfoundland, at Mount Pearl, on 30 December 2024 — almost exactly 57 years after the first shop opened.

Today the company describes itself as a chain of more than 750 restaurants “from BC to Newfoundland,” according to its own website as updated in April 2025. English Wikipedia counts more than 700 locations, including more than 150 non-traditional sites, and says most restaurants are in Ontario, with western franchises largely run through the Pizza 73 subsidiary.

A number people can sing.

The heart of the Pizza Pizza identity is not a picture but a number. The chain’s ordering line ends in 11-11, and in Toronto it is 967-11-11. English Wikipedia says one central local number serves every location until a call would become long-distance, and that in other cities the company asks for local numbers ending in 11-11 so they match the jingle in its radio advertising. The company says this early use of a single ordering number, and heavy promotion of the rhyming number, helped it grow across Ontario; English Wikipedia reports that as the company’s claim.

The number is also property. The Canadian Intellectual Property Office’s trademark database lists 967-1111 as a registered mark covering pizza pies, sandwiches, pasta dishes, salads and soft drinks, as well as restaurant, take-out and food delivery services. The register records use in Canada since at least February 1978, and an assignment in July 2005 from Pizza Pizza Limited to Pizza Pizza Royalty Limited Partnership. The company’s loyalty scheme carries the same digits: it is called Club 11-11.

The jingle has its own history. blogTO wrote in 2024 that the tune was made in the 1980s by Pat Withrow and the jingle writer Mike McCurlie of MJM Media, and that the chain later dropped the original melody for a new one after 2010. The same piece lists other parts of the brand’s past: a heated delivery bag, advertising on the spines of the Yellow Pages, and a 1989 series of television spots that stressed the chain’s Ontario roots and promised pizza in 30 minutes or free. Those older promises are history; the piece says the chain’s current advertising is mostly radio.

The name itself is guarded too. English Wikipedia says the unrelated American chain Little Caesars does not use its “Pizza! Pizza!” slogan in Canada because Pizza Pizza’s registration stands in the way, and uses other slogans there instead. The doubled word has a sibling in the company’s trademark list: English Wikipedia names Chicken Chicken as another of its marks.

Design and documentation.

Canada’s home-grown restaurant chains grew up alongside the American franchises that crossed the border, and many still introduce themselves by where they began. Harvey’s dates its first restaurant to Richmond Hill, Ontario, in 1959; Mary Brown’s traces its first to St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, in 1969. Their corporate and franchising pages tell those founding stories, name founders and owners, and describe their franchise networks in their own words.

The chains in this group cover burgers, fried and rotisserie chicken, subs, pizza, juice, salads, Thai dishes and burritos. On their own websites they present themselves through shopfronts, signage, packaging and a handful of named dishes, such as a lead burger or a chicken sandwich, repeated across their restaurants. In Quebec, names and menus appear in French, written as the companies write them.

Ownership is often grouped. Several of these brands belong to larger restaurant companies that run many chains at once: Recipe Unlimited, taken private by Fairfax Financial in October 2022, lists Harvey’s, Swiss Chalet and St-Hubert among its brands, according to the law firm Torys, and Mary Brown’s parent, MBI Brands, bought a Toronto burrito chain in 2022, The Telegram reported. Some restaurants share a building with a sibling brand, as some Harvey’s and Swiss Chalet locations do.

Some of these chains also trade abroad, at times under a shorter name, as Mary Brown’s does with MB Chicken. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand: who founded it, who owns it and how many restaurants a dated source gives it. It marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word, and its palettes and typefaces are our own interpretation, not the brands’ official ones.

A restaurant company and a royalty company.

Behind the shopfronts sit two companies. The restaurants are run by Pizza Pizza Limited, which is based in Toronto. The trademarks belong to a separate public vehicle. The company’s investor pages say Pizza Pizza Royalty Corp., formerly Pizza Pizza Royalty Income Fund, is an Ontario corporation that owns certain trademarks and trade names used by Pizza Pizza Limited in its restaurants, and earns royalty income on the sales of the Pizza Pizza and Pizza 73 restaurants in its royalty pool. The trademark register’s 2005 assignment of the 967-1111 mark to the royalty partnership fits that structure.

The same structure carried the chain west. Lexpert reported in October 2007 that Pizza Pizza Royalty Income Fund and Pizza Pizza Limited had completed the acquisition of Flying Pizza 73 Inc. and its affiliated companies on 24 July 2007. The fund took the trademarks and other intellectual property of the Edmonton-based chain, and Pizza Pizza took the operating business. Lexpert said the purchase let Pizza Pizza expand into western Canada, and that it then had 532 restaurant locations, mostly in Ontario and Quebec. English Wikipedia says that Pizza 73 still runs most of the group’s franchises in western Canada under its own name.

For a design guide, Pizza Pizza shows how a brand can be carried by sound and digits as much as by a logo: a doubled name, a number people sing, and the same 11-11 reused in the loyalty club. Compare Domino’s, another delivery chain with a strong identity, and Tim Hortons, another Canadian food chain. For this guide we use a brick red, a toasted orange and a cream with a heavy sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Pizza Pizza’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.