Pizza Hut Facts Fun Facts
* Pizza Hut is the world’s largest pizza restaurant chain, with nearly
12,000 restaurants, delivery-carry out units and kiosks in more than 86 countries.
It employs more than 240,000 people worldwide.
* Pizza Hut serves more than 1.7 million pizzas every day, to approximately
4 million customers worldwide.
* Pizza Hut delivers from more than 5,300 locations across the U.S.
* Pizza Hut uses 2.5 percent of all the milk (over 3.2 billion pounds) produced
in the U.S. every year for cheese. That cheese production requires a herd
of 250,000 dairy cows producing at full capacity 365 days a year.
* Pizza Hut uses more than 360 million pounds of REAL cheese per year; of
that, 335 million pounds is mozzarella cheese.
* Stuffed Crust Pizza used approximately 50% of the 35 million pounds of string
cheese produced in the U.S. in 1995.
* Pizza Hut uses more than 700 million pounds of flour each year, representing
the annual yield from nearly 500,000 acres of wheat.
* It takes more than 2.5 million hogs and almost 1.3 million head of cattle
to supply the annual pork and beef needs of Pizza Hut.
* Pizza Hut uses more than the equivalent of 525 million pounds of tomatoes
each year.
* Pizza Hut uses 50 million pounds of pepperoni per year. If you lay those
pepperoni slices side by side, they would create a path that would stretch
around the world twice and go to the moon!
* In the U.S., Pizza Hut’s "top five" toppings are old favorites
of Americans:
1. Pepperoni
2. Beef Topping
3. Italian Sausage
4. Mushrooms
5. Green Pepper
* Americans eat approximately 100 acres of pizza everyday.
* There are 4.2 billion pizza purchases made every year, which equates to
11.5 million purchases every day. Half of these purchases are done on Friday
and Saturday.
* Americans purchase more than $18 billion of fresh pizza every year. If you
add frozen and deli pizzas, the figure climbs to $25 billion a year.
* According to a Gallup Poll, 82 percent of kids age three to eleven prefer
pizza over chicken nuggets, hot-dogs, macaroni and cheese, and hamburgers.
* A national survey commissioned by Pizza Hut revealed that 18-29 year-old
males preferred pizza to ice cream, cookies and candy when indulging their
palates and nearly one-third of those surveyed rank pizza as their favorite
indulgence food over cookie, cake and candy.
Advertising and Promotions
1965 "Putt-Putt to Pizza Hut" musical jingle developed for Pizza
Hut’s first television commercial.
1966 Pizza Hut distributes wooden nickels as a coupon.
1967 World’s largest pizza (six feet in diameter) is baked and served
at the grand opening of a Fort Worth, Texas Pizza Hut restaurant.
1969 Red roof adopted for restaurants.
1970 Ed McMahon appears at Pizza Hut open house.
1982 Pizza Hut’s ET glass promotion picked as the top marketing promotion
of 1982 by the editorial staff of Chain Marketing and Management.
1984 BOOK IT!® national reading incentive program is launched with 200,000
elementary students enrolled.
1985 Pizza Hut launches new celebrity ad campaign featuring Herbie Hancock,
Hoyt Axton, Rita Moreno, Martin Mull, Pamela Stephenson and The MacKenzie
Brothers.
Pizza Hut units celebrate the release of "The Care Bears Movie"
with personal appearances, charity benefits, meal deals and drawing contests.
1989 Pizza Hut sells 9.1 million "Land Before Time" puppets. When
released to the public the movie enjoyed the largest opening ever for an animated
feature.
1992 "Beauty and the Beast" hand puppets available at all participating
Pizza Hut units.
1993 Pizza Hut makes its fastest and farthest delivery: 600 large pepperoni
pizzas on a 24-hour flight from Dover Air Force Base to U.S. service personnel
in Mogadishu, Somalia.
1994 Pizza Hut becomes the first national chain to offer pizza delivery on
the Internet with a test of delivery service at one unit in Santa Cruz, CA.
1995 Pizza Hut launches the "You’ll Love The Stuff We’re
Made Of"® campaign.
Stuffed Crust advertising shows larger-than-life celebrities eating the new
pizza backwards ... crust first. The ads bring together such unlikely pairs
as Ivana and Donald Trump Dallas Cowboys owner, Jerry Jones and player Deion
Sanders.
1996 Pizza Hut airs its first ever ad in the Super Bowl. The "Right Field,"
first produced in the late eighties, but seldom aired was chosen.
1997 The Edge™ Pizza advertising features Mikhail Gorbachev, the first-ever
head of state to appear in a commercial, and then brings Elvis back to life
during a Super Bowl commercial
1998 Pizza Hut celebrated 40 years of making and serving great pizza. Pizza
Hut launches "The Best Pizza Under One Roof™ campaign.
1999 "The Big New Yorker Pizza" advertising features: Fran Drescher,
Spike Lee and Donald Trump.
Product Introductions
1958 Original Thin ‘N Crispy® pizza introduced
1969 Salad added to menu
1970 Sandwiches added to menu
1975 Thick ‘N Chewy® pizza introduced.
1977 Super Supreme pizza introduced nationwide
1979 "Pizza Cake" offered as customers choose Pizza Hut for wedding
receptions and rehearsal dinners.
1980 Pan Pizza first introduced
1983 Personal Pan Pizza®, with a five-minute guarantee, is introduced
throughout the system.
1988 Hand –Tossed Traditional Pizza introduced
1993 BIGFOOT™ Pizza – two square feet of pizza cut into 21 slices
- introduced
1995 Buffalo Wings added to menu
Pizza Hut launches Stuffed Crust Pizza, which immediately sets company sales
records, becoming a $1 billion product during it’s first year.
1996 TripleDecker Pizza introduced in the United States and Canada.
Pizza Hut introduces two varieties of chicken topped pizzas – Italian
Chicken and Chicken Supreme.
1997 Pizza Hut launches "Totally New Pizzas," a quality initiative
putting sliced, fresh vegetables and meatier meats on pizzas.
THE EDGE® is introduced.
1998 The Sicilian Pizza, which combines basil, oregano and garlic baked into
a thicker rectangular crust is introduced.
1999 Pizza Hut launches ‘The Big New Yorker Pizza" a large 16-inch
pizza with 8 foldable slices.