Pizza

Time flies doesn’t it? It was just yesterday everyone was talking about Beyond Meat’s deep-friend nugget and boneless wing test in Georgia. Before we dive into the news, let’s do a head-count. As of writing, here’s an up-to-date compilation of all the fast-food restaurant chains with plant-based items on their menus (for sale, or in test markets):

• KFC, The Imposter (not a typo), a U.K. chicken burger
• Little Caesars, Supreme Pizza (spicy-sweet sausage)
• Qdoba, Qdoba Impossible Bowl or Qdoba Impossible Taco
• Burger King, Impossible Whopper
• Carl’s Jr., Beyond Famous Star
• Del Taco, Beyond Taco
• Dunkin’, Beyond Sausage Breakfast Sandwich
• Red Robin, Impossible Burger
• TGI Fridays, Beyond Burger 
• White Castle, Impossible Slider

Derrick Bryson Taylor for The Times writes:

For weeks, a debate over where to get the best chicken sandwich has waged between Popeyes, Chick-fil-A and the chicken-eating public at large. But KFC, another chicken giant with a global reach, is working on its own agenda: a plant-based “chicken” that proved so popular in a sales test that it sold out in a single day.

“It’s confusing, but it’s also delicious,” read a tweet from KFC on Monday announcing the sale of Beyond Fried Chicken, created with the help of the company Beyond Meat, at a single location in Atlanta. In about five hours on Tuesday, a KFC representative said, the restaurant sold as many plant-based boneless wings and nuggets as it would sell of its popular popcorn chicken in an entire week. (A “Kentucky Fried Miracle,” the company declared.)

In 24 hours, the test market sold out. This is simply put, delicious news for everyone.

From Nation’s Restaurant News:

Pizza Hut is introducing the throwback logo next week with a TV ad campaign supporting the limited-time return of Cheesy Bites Pizza. The so-called appetizer-and-pizza-in-one pie, which first debuted three years ago, has a crust made of 28 cheese-filled bites.

“We get a lot of fervor over it. It’s a nice pizza for sharing,” Radley said.
She said the popular LTO is the perfect platform for showcasing the return of the cleaner, old-fashioned red-roof logo, which was used in the 1960s and 1970s.

It moves away from the current “scripted and tilted” logo, which contains an outline of the roof, but it is white, not red.  The red-roof icon with “Pizza Hut” in black font makes the “brand pop,” Radley said.

Thank god.

That logo was a thing of nightmares, atrocious and was begging to be euthanized. Reverting back to the old logo is a great move. It was classic, iconic and doesn’t need any introductions. If I could be so bold, it was perfect. In a day and age where Pizza Hut’s chief competitor is doing everything under the sun, it’s refreshing to see The Hut return to its roots:

The coolest thing about this? The old logo is visible on it’s Santa Cruz-born website, in 1994, where the very first online order took place:

You could do all of this on PizzaNet, owned and operated by Pizza Hut. PizzaNet was an experiment that launched in the early 90’s, a way for Pizza Hut to test the waters and see if this World Wide Web thing had a real shot at a future. It was proposed by a particularly ambitious Pizza Hut owner in Santa Cruz, and developed by a few folks at a development shop known as Santa Cruz Operation (SCO).