Pizza Hut has vowed to removing artificial preservatives from its meat and cheese toppings during the next ten months, exactly 58 years since the brand opened its first restaurant in Wichita, Kansas.
The company will cut the preservatives BHA and BHT from its meat by the end of July. It will stop using antibiotics important to human medicine in the rearing of its chickens and eliminate artificial preservatives from its cheese by the end of March 2017.
The announcement has been made roughly a year after Pizza Hut became the US’ first national pizza chain to remove artificial flavours and colours from its core offering of pizzas, having removed 2.5 million pounds of salt from its ingredients in the last five years.
“We believe that Pizza Hut food shouldn’t only taste great, but you should feel great about it, too,” said Jeff Fox, chief brand and concept officer for the Texas-headquartered company. “Our enhanced and expanded commitment to superior restaurant-quality food is the result of listening closely to our customers, and they say that these are things that they do want in their pizzas.
“Providing our customers with restaurant quality ingredients is something that has been at the core of Pizza Hut since the very first restaurant opened in Wichita 58 years ago. It’s so fundamental to our superior restaurant quality beliefs that we rarely feel the need to talk about it. That said, 58 years later, we are extremely proud to say that we still get our vegetables, our meats, our tomatoes, our flour, our cheese – everything that makes a great pizza – from top suppliers around the world. We are constantly working to lead the industry in this area and believe it is important to let customers know exactly where their food comes from and how it’s made.”
Earlier changes to Pizza Hut’s menu include the elimination of partially hydrogenated oils and MSG. It also does not use any fillers in any of its meat toppings, its Italian sausage is all-natural and sourced from US farmers, and its marinara sauces is free from added sugar and oil.
© FoodBev Media Ltd 2024