Pizza Hut is finally selling slices — with a twist.
The pizza chain — which has been offering customers the convenience of a single-slice pie for 16 years — announced Thursday that it will begin selling slices as a single-serving option, rather than as a single-serving pie.
Beginning this fall, customers can order a single-serving slice of pepperoni, mushrooms and meat on the side and not need to spend the extra dough.
This shift would be a boon to some customers, at least for the time being, that prefer to eat a slice of cheese pizza.
But for others, the move means a loss of taste.
“I’m not a huge slice guy,” said Jonathan P., an employee at a local store in Los Angeles. “I like the whole pie.”
Pizza Hut Co.
Pizza Hut is a major player in the pizza business. Pizza Hut’s chief financial officer, Andrew Azzolini, told the Wall Street Journal this week that the chain has about 5 percent of the pizza market.
The company was founded in 1978 and has grown rapidly. In 2016, The New York Times’ restaurant critic John Doyle dubbed Pizza Hut one of the “dirtiest and most boring-at-best pizzerias” on the planet.
In January, Pizza Hut acquired a 2,800-square-foot, 11-year-old Manhattan street-cart and deli, opening the brand’s first restaurant in Westport in Connecticut. Another was opened in Santa Monica last month.
The company is also working on a smaller version of the store in Westwood, California, which was supposed to open in 2017.
The Times said in 2015 that the pizza chain had sold more than 1 million individual slices at more than 1,000 locations, costing about $1.5 billion since the mid-1990s.
It’s a story that the restaurant chain has heard a lot of over the years.
In 1997, when then-CEO Steve Ells was asked about the future of the product, he pointed to an analyst at Morgan Stanley who said, before the purchase of the company, Pizza Hut had only sold a couple hundred million of them a year.
Ells, who had worked at Pizza Hut since 1982
