Pizza Ranch opened its first Texas restaurant in Tyler on Sept. 21. On its own, that is a perfectly respectable local opening: a pizza-and-fried-chicken buffet with an arcade moving into an 11,435-square-foot former Ken’s Pizza. In context, though, Tyler looks more like a mile marker. Pizza Ranch has grown from a small-town Iowa pizza shop into a 220-plus-unit restaurant system, and the borders of its old Midwestern map are starting to move.
The chain says it was operating 221 restaurants and 105 FunZone Arcades by mid-2026. Its current location directory still shows just how regional the brand remains: 67 listings in Iowa, 39 in Minnesota and 32 in Wisconsin, before getting to its smaller footprints across the Dakotas, Illinois, Missouri, Nebraska, Kansas, Michigan, Montana, Colorado, Tennessee and Wyoming. That concentration explains one of the more peculiar things about Pizza Ranch: it can be a completely familiar institution in one part of the country and a restaurant many Americans have never encountered in another. If the name is new to you, geography may be the reason.
The business began in Hull, Iowa, in 1981, when 19-year-old Adrie Groeneweg opened a pizza restaurant in a town where residents were driving elsewhere to get one. The buffet arrived at the second restaurant in Orange City in 1983, franchising began a year later, and fried chicken joined the menu in 1987. Those additions gradually produced the combination Pizza Ranch is known for now: pizza, crispy chicken, homestyle sides, salad and desserts under one all-you-can-eat roof.
But the more consequential change in the modern Pizza Ranch may be happening beside the buffet rather than on it. The company opened its first FunZone Arcade in 2010. By February 2026, it was celebrating FunZone No. 100 in Council Bluffs, Iowa; its own franchise history says the count had reached 105 by midyear. New-build and conversion plans increasingly treat the arcade as part of the restaurant format rather than a side room with a few games.
The financial disclosures help explain why. Pizza Ranch’s 2026 franchise filing reports that 94 franchised restaurants with a FunZone averaged about $2.13 million in 2025 gross sales. At 85 FunZones that had been operating for at least a full year, the arcade portion alone averaged about $339,000 in annual revenue. Those figures do not prove that an arcade causes higher restaurant sales — markets, building sizes and individual operators differ — but they do establish that FunZone has become a material business within the business.
That matters because Pizza Ranch is not simply trying to plant an old-fashioned pizza buffet in more towns. The newer model can occupy a substantially larger footprint, with the company advertising restaurants in the 4,800- to 6,200-square-foot range plus another 1,200 to 3,000 square feet for a FunZone. Tyler goes larger still. A second Texas location is already listed as coming soon in Waco, where state records describe an 11,535-square-foot restaurant-and-arcade conversion, while a separate 9,644-square-foot Pizza Ranch project is under development in Royse City. Idaho Falls is also on the company’s coming-soon list, adding another state at the western edge of the chain’s traditional territory.
There is an important distinction here: Pizza Ranch is expanding, but it is not in some breathless 50-restaurants-a-year land grab. Its 2026 franchise disclosure document shows 219 restaurants at the end of 2025, only one more than at the end of 2024, with seven franchised openings and six terminations during the year. The same filing projected four to 14 new franchised restaurants in the following fiscal year, plus two company-owned openings. This is a mature chain widening its map and changing the economics of its format, not an overnight growth brand.
Its scale is nevertheless easy to underestimate. Restaurant Business, using Technomic data, ranked Pizza Ranch No. 135 among U.S. restaurant chains for 2024, with an estimated $362 million in U.S. sales and 218 units. Franchise Business Review has also continued to recognize the company in its franchisee-satisfaction programs, and Pizza Ranch says a substantial share of its development has historically come from existing operators opening additional restaurants.
The company’s franchise map makes the white space obvious. Texas is listed with most markets available, as are several other states around the existing footprint, while additional states are designated for future development. That is not the same thing as an announced opening pipeline, and Pizza Ranch is still a long way from being coast-to-coast. There are no restaurants in huge portions of the Northeast, Southeast and West.
Still, Tyler is useful precisely because it shows what Pizza Ranch is becoming. A 45-year-old buffet chain that once grew through small Midwestern towns is entering new states with restaurants large enough to function as family-entertainment centers, and it is doing so at a time when much of the buffet business has spent years shrinking, retrenching or reinventing itself. Pizza Ranch appears to have chosen reinvention without abandoning the buffet at all. The buffet is still the center of the ranch. There is simply an increasingly large arcade attached to it.
