The Most Hated Pizza Toppings May Surprise You, Poll Says You’ll Eat It Anyway Because Pizza

Photo: adomer (Getty Images)

If you’re an avid pizza eater, you know that there’s an obvious hierarchy of toppings. If you’re a finicky eater or you’re too lazy pick a topping or two, you can’t beat a piece of classic cheese pizza. Go ahead and order extra cheese, it won’t bother us. You can assume, if you were to poll a bunch of reasonably average pizza eaters, you’d likely get a majority of people who consider pepperoni to be the best pizza topping. Whether its classic pepperoni, old fashioned, or even turkey pepperoni, we don’t care. Well, you actually don’t have to guess the best and worst pizza toppings because someone actually polled people to find out the truth.

2,000 pizza-eating adults were surveyed by pizza chain Donatos in a poll conducted by One Poll. They were asked a variety of questions including how often they enjoy pizza, whether they know the best pizza places in their area, where to get the best slices, how they eat it, and whether or not they’d let someone ruin the plot of every movie for a year to get free pizza for that same year. But the one we care most about is on the topic of pizza toppings.

First, the poll showed that, unsurprisingly, the most popular topping is pepperoni with 42% believing it belongs on their pizza. While it took the top spot, we’re fairly surprised that more than 50% of pizza fans don’t like it. Second place with 39% was sausage. Onions (with 37% approval) was a bit of a head-scratcher at third place. We expected peppers or perhaps mushrooms in this spot.

You might assume that pineapple (the fruit the Prime Minister of Iceland once tried to ban from the country’s pizzas) was the most hated, but it isn’t. Anchovies are disliked by 35% of the surveyed pizza fanatics. Pineapple can in second at 32% and jalapenos rounded out the worst three with 27%.

All this pizza poll really proves is that people have really varied tastes when it comes to pizza. While we don’t mind throwing some bacon and jalapenos on ours, we usually stick to the classic, crispy pepperoni.