The Pizza Factory

Bill Randall and Bill Kringlen — two Bills — opened the first Pizza Factory on August 20, 1979, on the corner of St. George Blvd and Main. The town in 1979 was a different town: still effectively two stoplights, no Walmart, no Mall Drive, no Pineview corridor. The Bills opened a hand-tossed-pizza family restaurant on the busiest intersection downtown, and over the next four-plus decades the format spread across the western United States as a regional chain. The St. George operation — the original — has stayed under local ownership.

Forty-Five Years on the Same Corner

The brand celebrated forty-four years of operation in 2023, and the St. George Blvd location remains the original storefront. Pizza Factory’s growth as a chain happened from St. George outward: corporate licensed the concept across Utah, Nevada, Arizona, California, and Idaho, but the local operator runs the multiple Southern Utah stores under the stgeorgepizzafactory.com umbrella. The Pineview location is one of those; others surface in directory listings without being fully enumerated. The St. George Chamber of Commerce member directory carries Pizza Factory–Pineview as a current member.

The Original Breadsticks Stayed

What the Bills built in 1979 is still recognizable inside the format. Hand-tossed crusts, the original breadsticks, a family-restaurant pace, the kind of pizza-and-pasta menu that crossed cleanly between birthday parties and Friday-night sit-downs. The format hasn’t drifted much — there are remodels and menu rotations across the chain, but the St. George operator has held the restaurant close to its 1979 identity. That kind of continuity is one of the reasons the brand grew chain-wide in the first place: the format works because it doesn’t try to do too much.

Pizza Factory in the 435

For a register of locally rooted Southern Utah businesses, Pizza Factory is a 45-plus-year St. George original — the rare local concept that built outward into a regional chain rather than a single-location story. The register only lists the St. George operator and the local Southern Utah stores it runs; the broader chain falls outside the 435 footprint by definition. But the founding-on-the-corner narrative belongs to St. George, and the original Boulevard-and-Main address is part of how downtown’s restaurant history reads. The Bills built a chain that started on a corner that, in 1979, was most of the corner the town had.