Yum Brands : Pizza Hut Celebrates 58 Years of Heritage

Jun 2, 2016

58 years ago on May 31st, 1958, two brothers opened a restaurant in Wichita, KS with a simple but noble goal to serve great pizza to their neighbors while exhibiting superior customer service. Pizza Hut seeks to continue that great legacy by sticking to its roots and providing quality food and service for many years to come. In pursuit of that goal Pizza Hut is constantly innovating, looking for ways to bring its customers best in class products and a customer experience to remember.

See facts below for how Pizza Hut has delivered on this promise check out the new Pizza Hut microsite dedicated to the brand's food story at www.PizzaHut.com/RestaurantQuality. This website spotlights the ingredients, heritage, innovations, and more so that customers can learn about where Pizza Hut ingredients come from.

DID YOU KNOW?

• In May 2015 Pizza Hut was the first national pizza restaurant to remove artificial flavors and colors from its core pizzas.
• Over the past five years, Pizza Hut has removed 2.5 million pounds of salt from its ingredients.
• The mushrooms used go from farm to Pizza Hut pizza in as a little as 48 hours.
• Pizza Hut tomatoes begin the process of becoming sauce within approximately four hours of being picked from the vine.
• Speaking of tomatoes, Pizza Hut still uses some of the same fields in California's Central Valley that its founders did.
• Since 1958 Pizza Hut's been using the same wheat farmer, farm and mill to make the flour that goes in its dough. One of the current farmers is the fourth generation to work with Pizza Hut.
• Jim LePrino's family owned LePrino Foods has been providing Pizza Hut with high quality 100% real mozzarella cheese since 1968. It was through this partnership that shredded cheese as opposed to sliced became the industry standard for pizza.

And the work doesn't stop there! As Pizza Hut continues to seek improvements they announced this week that they will remove the following from its list of ingredients:

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

Want to learn more about how Pizza Hut got its start 58 years ago and how those founding principles of superior food quality shape who the brand is today? Watch the video below: