Pizza Hut Announces New Food Commitments, Launches Microsite Dedicated To Food You Feel Good About Story

Pizza Hut, recognized as the pizza restaurant which serves and delivers more pizzas than any other pizza restaurant in the world, will remove the following from its list of ingredients:

• BHA/BHT from all meats by end of July 2016
• Artificial preservatives from cheese by end of March 2017
• Antibiotics important to human medicine from chicken for its pizzas by end of March 2017

This comes roughly a year after Pizza Hut became the first national pizza restaurant to remove artificial flavors and colors from its core pizzas in May 2015. Pizza Hut has removed 2.5 million pounds of salt from its ingredients over the last five years.

"We believe that Pizza Hut food shouldn't only taste great, but you should feel great about it, too," said Jeff Fox, chief brand and concept officer, Pizza Hut. "Our enhanced and expanded commitment to superior restaurant-quality food is the result of listening closely to our customers, and they say that these are things that they do want in their pizzas.

"Providing our customers with restaurant quality ingredients is something that has been at the core of Pizza Hut since the very first restaurant opened in Wichita 58 years ago. It's so fundamental to our superior restaurant quality beliefs that we rarely feel the need to talk about it. That said, 58 years later, we are extremely proud to say that we still get our vegetables, our meats, our tomatoes, our flour, our cheese – everything that makes a great pizza – from top suppliers around the world. We are constantly working to lead the industry in this area and believe it is important to let customers know exactly where their food comes from and how it's made."

Pizza Hut has been pioneering the food and service experience in the pizza category since its inception. How they've done it has a lot to do with how they started – as a family. Pizza Hut has maintained – intentionally – a family-first business approach. This is especially true in the area of food. Pizza Hut has partnered with some of the same family farms in Kansas to grow the wheat for its dough since the late 1950s. Pizza Hut still harvests tomatoes to make its sauce from some of the same fields in California's Central Valley that their founders did more than 50 years ago. In fact, most of the cheese used on Pizza Hut pizza today is made by the same family-run cheese supplier that did so many decades ago.

"The decisions made by our Founders involving relationships and partners have a lot to do with why we are still the most loved pizza restaurant in the world," said Fox. "It comes from a fundamental truth about Pizza Hut: We started as a restaurant and maintain a restaurant-first mentality in everything we do. From how pizzas are prepared, how customers are served and how the entire experience is presented. We strongly believe in our foundation of being a restaurant that serves people, not just pizza, and that personal service is more important to our customers today than ever before. That's why we are proudly making advancements in our food commitments and our dedication to serve."

Why is this so important? Because relationships matter. Quality matters. And service cannot be compromised. To further demonstrate the significance of this, Pizza Hut has created a microsite dedicated to its food story at www.PizzaHut.com/RestaurantQuality. The site spotlights its ingredients, heritage, innovations and more. Customers can learn about where Pizza Hut ingredients come from and how the pizzas are made. For example, mushrooms go from farm to Pizza Hut pizza in as little as 48 hours, and sun-soaked tomatoes begin the process of becoming Pizza Hut sauce within approximately four hours of being picked from the vine.

In addition to these ingredient simplifications, Pizza Hut has already eliminated partially hydrogenated oils (also known as artificial trans fats) and MSG. Currently, 15 percent of the restaurant's pizzas have just one third of the daily recommended dietary allowance for sodium, and 20 percent of its pizzas will meet that criteria by 2020.

The pizza restaurant does not use any fillers in any of its meat toppings. Its Italian sausage is all natural and sourced from U.S. farmers, and its meatballs are free of any artificial colors, flavors or preservatives. Pizza Hut also does not add any sugar or oil to its pizza marinara sauce, and its cheese is made from 100 percent whole milk mozzarella.

Pizza Hut announced earlier this year plans to redesign up to 700 restaurants each year, with a goal of operating 8,000 restaurants in the United States by 2022 – that's a growth of 27 percent from the 6,400 restaurants Pizza Hut currently operates domestically. This redesign is intended to increase efficiency and convenience for team members and customers.

Pizza Hut is known around the world for its long heritage of breakthrough innovation in food and beyond, including the original Pan® Pizza, Stuffed Crust, Cheesy Bites, Crazy Cheesy Crust, and more. The pizza restaurant also has the world's busiest website in the pizza category at www.pizzahut.com. Nearly 50 percent of the pizza restaurant's orders come through digital channels, of which 60 percent are via mobile device.

For more information, visit blog.pizzahut.com or to order now, visit www.pizzahut.com.

About Pizza Hut

Pizza Hut, a subsidiary of Yum! Brands, Inc. (NYSE: YUM), delivers more pizza, pasta and wings than any other restaurant in the world. The pizza restaurant began 58 years ago in Wichita, Kansas, when two brothers borrowed $600 from their mom to start a pizzeria.

What started out small has become the biggest pizza restaurant in the world and today operates more than 16,000 restaurants in 100 countries serving innovative pizzas, traditional favorites like the signature Pan Pizza, and much more. Pizza Hut also is the proprietor of the BOOK IT!® Program, which is a long-standing children's literacy program used in more than 630,000 classrooms nationwide. For more information, visit www.pizzahut.com. Follow Pizza Hut on Facebook (www.facebook.com/PizzaHut), Twitter (www.twitter.com/pizzahut) and Instagram (www.instagram.com/pizzahut).

*For all media inquiries, please contact Pizza Hut:

Doug Terfehr, 972-338-6992, [email protected]

Courtney Moscovic, 972-338-8288, [email protected]

Video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1uWlN6UErw

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160530/373406

SOURCE Pizza Hut

Related Links

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