Hot dog-crusted pizza: Can it save Pizza Hut in America?

Pizza Hut has confirmed that a line of its 'Hot Dog Bites Pizza' will be available in its 6,300-plus US locations starting next week. Wildly popular overseas, the entrée consists of a large one-topping pizza surrounded with 28 pigs-in-a-blanket.

|
Pizza Hut
A press shot of the Hot Dog Bites Pizza from Pizza Hut.

It’s tough being a fast food chain these days. Your sales are dropping as fresher, more nutritious foods and trendy newcomers like Chipotle invade your market share. Those mercurial, highly-coveted Millennial diners are choosing to eat elsewhere, leaving you to resort to desperate measures to win them back.

In these hard times, menu overhauls and extreme rebranding measures are crucial. Sure, you could work to convince the eating public that you have their nutritional best interests in mind, by dropping artificial dyes and chemicals, nixing soda from kids’ meals, and phasing out chicken raised with antibiotics from your supply chain. The usual. But to really get their attention, you need something flashy. Something decadent. Something that gets people talking, even if they’re saying, “Is this really necessary?” 

You need a hot dog-crusted pizza. 

That’s the decision Pizza Hut made Wednesday, when it confirmed that a line of its “Hot Dog Bites Pizza” will be available in its 6,300-plus US locations starting next week. The entrée consists of a large one-topping pizza surrounded with 28 pigs-in-a-blanket that serve as the crust.

A news release called it “the perfect combination for American tastebuds,” but the chain has been testing even more daring variations on the meat-stuffed pizza crust concept overseas for past few years.  It first unveiled the hot dog pizza in South Korea in the late 2000s, then in the UK in 2012. It got even more ambitious for its locations in the Middle East, offering pizzas lined with a choice of tiny hamburgers or tiny chicken sandwiches. As of 2012, the chain’s Japan restaurants served the “Winter Double King” Pizza, featuring a crust stuffed with mayonnaise and shrimp.

No word if US seafood lovers can expect that on this side of the world anytime soon, but anything’s possible – the Hot Dog Bites Pizza is just the latest effort for the struggling chain (its US same-store sales fell 3 percent in 2014) to turn itself around. In November, Pizza Hut introduced a new line of specialty “craft” pizzas, with an expanded array of sauces, toppings, and ingredients like salami and fresh spinach. In May, along with Taco Bell, its sister chain under the Yum! Brands umbrella, it announced that it was dropping much-maligned artificial ingredients like Yellow 6 dye and high fructose corn syrup from its ingredients list.

Such changes are becoming typical among the nation’s fast food giants, particularly as customers become more knowledgeable and discerning about what goes into their food. But that doesn’t mean the arms race to create those outrageous conversation-piece menu items, like KFC’s double down or Hardee’s half-pound Great American Thickburger, is getting any less heated. Last week, Dunkin’ Donuts began selling a doughnut dusted with Chips Ahoy! chocolate chip cookies and filled with a chocolate chip cookie dough filling.  Taco Bell, ever an innovator this sphere, has given us both a chicken biscuit taco and Cap’n Crunch doughnut holes in 2015.

The hot dog crust pizza, though, is a more proven concept than those. Pizza Hut executives claim it’s the company’s most popular specialty pizza overseas, and it toured several countries, including Australia, before making its way to the United States. 

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Hot dog-crusted pizza: Can it save Pizza Hut in America?
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/The-Bite/2015/0611/Hot-dog-crusted-pizza-Can-it-save-Pizza-Hut-in-America
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe