Pizza Hut recently tried out a new and trendy plant-based topping that will be served in compostable round boxes. The famous fast-food company shared this decision on Tuesday, saying that the samples would be served only for a day – Wednesday – and only at one of their Phoenix locations.
The Zume’s round pizza boxes will soon become the rage because they are industrially compostable and can keep the pizzas fresher, crispier, and hotter for longer spans of time while also being inter-lockable thus imparting improved stability.
The automated pizza delivery startup is focused on sustainability, and the idea for round pizza boxes is gaining so much traction because of the fact that it utilizes lesser packaging as opposed to the conventional square boxes that are used for pizzas.
Nicolas Burquier, who is Pizza Hut’s chief customer and operations officer, said, ‘This revolutionary round box — the result of a two-year journey — is the most innovative packaging we’ve rolled out to date. The round box was engineered to make our products taste even better — by delivering hotter, crispier pizzas.’ These boxes are also cheaper to produce and make use of only one piece of cardboard.
Alex Garden, who is Zume founder and CEO, said, ‘When you put pizza on a flat surface, it cools off, and the moisture is absorbed into the box. As the pizza gets cold, the moisture is absorbed back into the pizza. So we created this box where we have the pizza sitting on a raised cushion, and air actually circulates, so it stays crispy all the time.’
Pizza Hut and Zume collaborated for making the one-day event in Phoenix a possibility. Pizza Hut also used this opportunity to try out a new pizza, the Garden Specialty Pizza. The pizza had a plant-based meat topping known as incogmeato. Incogmeato is basically a soy-based product that is meant to mimic Italian sausage and comes from MorningStar Farms that is owned by Kellogg.
Along with the round pizza box, the Garden Specialty Pizza was sold at $10 at 3602 E. Thomas Road in Phoenix. All of the proceeds were sent to Arizona Forward – a non-profit that is geared towards sustainability. Pizza Hut will be making the decision about a wider launch of the round box soon enough based on the feedback from this one-day event.
