Pizza Hut Is Making The Biggest Pizza In The World, And It's Astronomical
In 2012, a group of Italian pizza experts at NIPfood broke the Guinness World Record for the world's largest pizza. The massive gluten-free pie, which the creators named Ottavia after the Roman emperor Octavian Augustus, boasted a surface area of 13,580.28 square feet. This week, multinational restaurant chain Pizza Hut decided to shoot its shot as Ottavia's successor.
The pie, which is currently taking up 14,001 square feet at the Los Angeles Convention Center, per CNN, is an astronomically scaled-up version of the fan-favorite Big New Yorker (a 16-inch "New York-inspired pizza" with six extra-large, foldable slices). The pie will return to stores for a limited time starting February 1 after a 25-year hiatus. But why is Pizza Hut suddenly vying for a World Record? According to CEO David Graves, the enormous pizza is more than just a marketing scheme. The move is simply the latest installment of the chain's pizza-pioneering ways.
Move over, Italy
The process of making the giant pizza (which is composed of 13,653 pounds of dough, 4,948 pounds of pizza sauce, over 8,800 pounds of cheese, and around 630,496 pieces of pepperoni, per CNN) more or less requires the same steps as a regular pie. First came the dough, which workers rolled out over what looks like a giant sheet of impenetrable plastic. Then came the sauce and the toppings, which we imagine took hours and hours to assemble in accordance with Pizza Hut guidelines. Finally, oversized heat lamps were positioned over the pie to heat it right there on the floor of the Convention Center. In case you're worried about food waste, know that the company plans to donate each of the pie's 68,000 slices to local food banks.
Amazingly enough, AZ Central says Pizza Hut broke another Guinness World Record in early January 2023 by making a special delivery to the summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro. And who can forget when Pizza Hut became the first of its kind to deliver to the International Space Station in 2001? The chain truly goes above and beyond.