Pizza Hut thinking outside the box with a round container
WASHINGTON — Consider the pizza box. Not a specific pizza box, because they all pretty much look the same, but all the pizza boxes you might have encountered anytime in the last half-century or so. They’re probably some combination of red, white and green, and maybe feature an Italian-looking chef with a swirly mustache. They’re bulky, and you struggle to fit them in your fridge when there are leftovers, or even in your trash can when they’re empty.
The pizza box has been this way for decades.
And so what might seem like a small step — Pizza Hut’s announcement this week that it’s trying out a high-tech design that’s round instead of square — feels like a giant leap for pizza-kind.
“For the most part, only marginal changes have been made to pizza boxes through the years,” Nicolas Burquier, Pizza Hut’s chief customer and operations officer, said in an email. “This round box leverages new technology and represents step change innovation.”
The pie chain’s claims about the new box are many.
Some of its shiny new features are meant to improve its function and use: The round shape means there’s less waste, and it’s made of sustainably harvested plant fiber. It’s industrially compostable. Less material also means it takes up less space on the shelves of Pizza Hut locations — and in your fridge.
The box has ridges on the bottom exterior and grooves in the top, so multiples can lock together, meaning there’s no slipping during delivery or when you’re toting a stack into a party. They don’t require time-consuming assembling by employees, and they break down easily — you can fold them over multiple times until you have something compact enough to drop into your trash can.
And there are taste claims too.
Grooves along the bottom help catch grease and circulate air to prevent soggy crust, says Pizza Hut, and the latch closure keeps heat in, so your pie ostensibly stays warmer longer.
“I think one day in the future we’ll reminisce about the idea of round pizzas in square boxes and laugh,” Burquier said.
Burquier described the box as the result of a two-year development process along with Zume, the Silicon Valley startup company whose pizza-delivery innovations include robots assembling the pies and trucks that bake your pizza en route to your home to cut down on what’s known in the industry as “dwell time.”
Their method, he said, was hands — and taste buds — on: “We ate a LOT of pizza.”
Zume first introduced a round pizza box, which it called the Pizza Pod, in 2017. And Apple has a patented circular pizza box that it uses for the pizzas served in its campus cafeterias.
But Scott Wiener, a pizza-box collector and author of “Viva la Pizza!: The Art of the Pizza Box,” says it’s potentially significant for a giant like Pizza Hut to start using a 2.0-style box. “That could be huge,” he said.
He said cost is the primary factor stifling pizzabox innovation.
Pizza Hut is testing the new design in Phoenix, with plans to roll it out to other areas in the future.
It’s a big change for the company, which has been using standard boxes since the 1970s.