Margin on ingredients specifically was mentioned. Anyway, I contend that pizza is more labour intensive than bread.

You can fit many loaves of bread in the oven space of one pizza.

No doubt that in some circumstances, pizza is a more viable business model than bread. I'm just skeptical that the margin on a pizza sale is typically better than bread.

For prep work, you can store pizza dough as little balls, or pre-flatten them and put them on racks, freezing many more pizza doughs than bread doughs. Preparing a pizza crust is as easy as using a press, but to make consistent bread you need a complicated machine that's annoying to clean. Bread also needs a proofer if you're serious about mass producing it, hence needing more space. Otherwise you can enjoy handcrafting your bread and cultivating yeast, which is another art and science all to itself.

While less pizzas fit in a pizza oven than bread may fit in a bread oven, it's easier to prepare pizzas, easier to hire for, and people pay more for them.

Pizza dough is bread dough, the process is the same up to a point. In making loaves, you will have them portioned as balls at some point, same as pizza. You will shape them and put them on racks, same as pizza (pizza stacks/packs more efficiently here, but that seems irrelevant. Bakeries aren't in the habit of mass storage of shaped dough). Shaping a loaf can be a few seconds with your hands, same as pizza. Labour saving devices, like a dough sheeter for pizza, is just that in either case: labour saving. Bread loaves can be made with or without a proofer, as can pizza.

Preparing and hiring for something like Pizza Hut or Domino's is undoubtedly easier. But at an independent bakery, I really don't see the case for pizza being a higher margin item.

Pizza dough typically has oil and sugar, bread dough does not.

Pizza dough is typically bulk fermented cold for 2-12 days, bread dough is usually bulk fermented at room temperature for 1-4 hrs. Rye breads are a bit different and the fermentation is staged over about 36hr, at room temp.

>Margin on ingredients specifically was mentioned.

Ingredients were mentioned as classifications for product types.

>You can fit many loaves of bread in the oven space of one pizza.

Not really. Maybe 2-3 decent sized loaves in the footprint of one large pizza, but you can also bake pizzas in much less vertical space, so you can have double the baking surface footprint for pizzas in the same oven volume.

In reality, dedicated pizza ovens are tall enough fit most styles of bread. The necessities of air circulation means you can't shrink the vertical space as much as you might like to.

Anyway, it seems to me the important metric in this regard would be how many items per unit time a baker can effectively manage. Pizza requires some amount of attention more or less constantly. I doubt one baker can manage more than 5 at time, even if the oven could fit many more. Meanwhile that same baker can set a timer on an oven containing many dozens of bread loaves and forget about them until they're done.

You'll burn the top of the loaf if you try to bake a typical artisan batard or boule in a commercial pizza deck oven, due to radiative heat from the top of the oven. You could probably get away with focaccia or similar short flat-top breads.

Items per unit baker time doesn't really matter. 5 pizzas takes say 15-20 minutes of baker+oven time and gives you (using your numbers from up thread) $76 revenue (net ingredient costs). 3 dozen loaves takes a similar amount of baker time, 3x as much oven time (and probably at least double the required oven volume), gives you similar revenue, and is much harder to sell.

A sandwich loaf baked in a pan should be made in a different style of oven, but the types of bread you're talking about are ideally made in the same style of deck oven as pizzas.

To achieve that speed of pizza turnout would be quite the feat I think. Is this factoring in assembling pizzas? Checking/rotating pizzas partway through baking? The oven would have to be running much hotter than for the bread (admittedly no idea of the costs here). You'd probably have to use 5 separate decks to avoid slowing the bake when loading/unloading, 5 decks that could be packed with loaves rather than a single pizza.

Meanwhile, I don't see why it should take more than 10 minutes to load an oven with 3 dozen loaves. During the bake time, the baker can be mixing or shaping another batch or any other task. The pizza maker realistically can't be doing anything but assembling/baking pizzas.

Separate from baking, pizza necessitates the added labour of grating cheese and making sauce, or paying a premium for prepared versions.

No argument that 36 loaves is a harder sell than 5 pizzas. That's sales volume though, not margin.

Margin is zero if you can't sell it.

Could a bread oven pack more efficiently than a pizza oven? It seems easier to put a bunch of rectangular prisms in a space compared to largeish disks

If you're baking rectangular prisms you're competing with $2 grocery store bread. To have a chance as an independent baker you need to go after the more expensive "artisan" type breads which are typically oblong or round (boules) and not baked in a pan.

There's plenty of "artisan" sandwich loaf, baked-in-a-pan bread out there.