Is Wawa pizza really that bad? We asked five teenagers.

Domino’s and Pizza Hut and Little Caesars and Papa Johns.

And, yes, Wawa.

As the convenience chain spreads its goose wings farther and farther from its Delaware County home base, its menu has expanded beyond Shortis, coffees, and soups into burgers, fries, pastas, garlic knots, and now pizza.

Didn’t Wawa try pizza before? In fact, it did. Twice.

It briefly tested pan pizza with Pizza Hut in the mid-1990s and introduced what it called “deep-dish focaccia pizza” in 2014; at the time, my colleagues reported that it “looked like an accident.”

Wawa’s third attempt at pizza launched this summer. Not surprisingly, media attention has not been favorable, typical of Wawa product launches. Adam Schmidt of DrinkPhilly posted on Facebook: “I just ate a Wawa pizza. Don’t do that.” Ernest Owens’ review at Eater Philly carried the headline, “I know you now have pizza, Wawa. No, thank you.” Washington Post cheap-eats critic Tim Carman’s review was topped with “Wawa pizza tastes like cheese-topped cardboard. So why does it exist?”

Rough.

Meanwhile, Wawa is going hard with the marketing. At 24-hour stores, the pizzas are offered from 4 p.m. till 3 a.m. In some areas, Wawa offers free delivery of the 14- and 16-inch pies, available in plain, mushroom, pepperoni, sausage, and veggie versions. All of that said, this cannot be good news for your corner pizzeria, especially when Wawa charges a reasonable $14.99 for a plain 16-inch cheese.

But if the pizza is as awful as the critics say it is, where’s the worry to pizza shop owners?

It can’t be that bad, right?

I decided that a taste test was in order, but not among jaded journalists.

Who better to judge pizzas than teenagers? I found five hungry 11th graders after school Thursday sitting in the principal’s office at Science Leadership Academy in Spring Garden. They were in Principal Chris Lehmann’s office not because they were acting out, but because they knew that pizza was coming. They also knew that they had to act quickly before the track team returned from practice.

The students — all Wawa customers, especially for the Oreo milkshakes — had not tried the pizza. I bought five 16-inch pies from the Wawa near the Art Museum — next door to a Domino’s, whose 12- and 14-inch pizzas are comparably priced — and sat back for their reaction.

From the opening of the first box, they found the pizza too cheesy — though they appreciated the cheese-pull as they separated the slices. My six-block, 10-minute drive in rush-hour traffic had allowed the mozzarella, which was only lightly browned, to settle into a thick coating atop a slick of tomato sauce. The edges and thin bottom were browned. (To me, it resembled the Domino’s pizzas that my 12-year-olds crave.)

“This is a good party pizza,” said Twyla Nunes-Ueno, 16, who rated it 6 / 10 overall because the crust “(5 / 10)” seemed “pretty burnt” with “not much flavor” while the toppings “(7 / 10)” included “lots of cheese” but “not enough sauce.” Her go-to pizza is the Buffalo chicken pizza from CityView.

“It’s definitely going to hit the 2 a.m. crowd,” Nunes-Ueno said. “It’s edible.”

“The pizza tasted burnt at first, but the pepperoni kept me there the whole ride,” said Cianney Saunders, 17, who rated it “5.36 / 10,” mainly for the low sauce-to-cheese ratio and the “burnt-ness.”

“Tastes like cheap pizza, 6.5 / 10,” said Eden McCarthy, 17, who prefers Aldi’s frozen cheese pizza. Like the other students, McCarthy couldn’t imagine ordering a Wawa pizza with extra cheese. “There’s not enough sauce for my taste,” they said. Further, “the crust isn’t flexible enough and the bottom is a little burnt.” They liked the veggie version, which has mushrooms, red onions, and green peppers, better than the plain cheese.

“Not bad — 7 / 10,” said Jalop Pewu, 17, who wished I had ordered the optional garlic butter crust. The taste of the cheese “wasn’t bad, but there was way too much.”

Marcos Rufino, 16, who fancies himself a connoisseur (he works at Töska, a pizzeria in Mount Airy), and makes his own pizza at home (”it’s a three-day process”), said he wanted more onion, garlic, and pepper in the sauce. He rated the pizza overall 7 / 10 — assigning his lowest scores (5 / 10) for sauce and and a category he devised called “design / look.” All told, Rufino said, “it tastes significantly better than I thought it would.”

And that’s the point. Chain pizzerias have set the bar so low that Wawa has hit it.