Pizza Hut is getting the private equity treatment in a $2.7 billion deal as its owner offloads the brand that defined 1990s dining nostalgia

After years of being a struggling business and losing ground to competing chains, Pizza Hut’s fate will now rest with private equity. Yum Brands announced on Tuesday it sold Pizza Hut to private equity firm Long Range Capital for about $1.5 billion. Yum China Holdings Inc. will acquire the chain’s mainland China locations in a separate deal worth about $1.2 billion. For years, Pizza Hut has struggled to keep up with other casual pizza chains, particularly Domino’s, which dethroned it as the world’s largest pizza chain in 2017. A year later, Pizza Hut announced it would close 500 of its nearly 7,500 locations by the middle of 2021. In 2020, the chain said it would close up to 300 more locations following the bankruptcy of one of its largest franchises, NPC International. KFC and Taco Bell have continued to succeed under Yum Brands, which began exploring options for Pizza Hut in Nov. 2025. At the end of last year, Pizza Hut had 19,974 restaurants worldwide, but today, many locations in the U.S. have shuttered, and There are nearly 1,500 fewer Pizza Hut locations than there were at the chain’s peak in the U.S. in the early 1990s. It’s a long fall for a brand still recognized by its red roof. Pizza Hut was first opened in 1958 by two brothers, Wichita State University students Dan and Frank Carney, after their mother gave them a $600 loan, and the two brought it public in 1969. It became the largest global pizza chain two years later and a mainstay for American families who would sit under Tiffany-style lamps under red-checkerboard tablecloths to munch on doughy slices of pepperoni pizza. With a private equity takeover, new ownership could either be a chance for the brand to recapture the hearts of nostalgic Americans, or a death knell. “It’s anyone’s guess as to what private equity does,” Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData Retail, told Fortune. “Private equity can be a force for good. They can invest in the business—try and grow Pizza Hut, invest