How much pepperoni is sold in the United States?

Via the ever wonderful Matt Levine, this interesting Fermi question: 

A few weeks into his college summer internship at a consulting firm in 2015, a guy (let’s call him Calvin) got his big chance to make a good impression. He was assigned to help a private equity firm assess an acquisition target—in this case, a company that manufactured pepperoni. “I was 21 years old, researching questions I don’t know if anyone knows the answer to, like the market size for pepperoni in the US,” says Calvin, who asked that his name not be used to preserve his current professional reputation.

After two 80-hour weeks of research, Calvin’s peers in the sweaty intern bullpen in an office off New York’s Times Square were ready to present their findings. But he still lacked the crucial number. “I was the bottleneck, and I wasn’t doing a great job communicating to my boss,” he says. His solution? “I found a claim from some executive online that the market size for pepperoni is enough that you could blanket the entire USA with a thin layer,” says Calvin. 

He spent hours putting together and executing a plan. He calculated the area of the entire continental US (3,120,426 square miles). Then he came up with the area of a single pepperoni slice: If the diameter of a circular slice of pepperoni is half an inch, each pepperoni is 0.196 square inches. The area of the continental US, divided by the area of a single pepperoni slice, equals 15,920,541 slices, which he labeled the national pepperoni volume. Finally, he multiplied that volume by price (10¢ per slice, based on his market research) to come up with the country’s pepperoni market size at $1,592,054 per year.

I still love Fermi problems, so I'm stumped at this rather silly suggestion for the problem. Granted, he was 21 years old. (Note that Matt Levine notes that the math is also incorrect and quite a few orders of magnitude off.) 

It's remarkable to me that this person could not, I dunno, talk to some pepperoni or pizza executives, especially in 2015. Surely if you talk to enough of them and get some guesses, you could average them. Or, you could find out the actual revenue/volume of one of the (I'm guessing) 10 players in 'industrial volume pepperoni' and then make some guesses as to their market share. 

I've done a fair bit of "how many tons of this chemical exist in the United States?" this year, so I'm especially fired up to answer these questions. 

(That question about the iodine waste - surely someone has the answer to "how many kilograms of iodine does it take to make a cloud large enough to see for miles?")