Not every food is celebrated for an entire month. And is there any food more deserving of a month-long celebration than pizza? Well, not one that we can think of.
October is National Pizza Month in the USA. Needless to say, here at KettlePizza we think of every month as national pizza month – but every October, it’s official! So we thought we’d take the opportunity to share some of the history of National Pizza Month with you. Next time you’re entertaining friends and family with a delicious pie cooked in your made in the USA KettlePizza, you’ll have a few pizza fun facts to share.
First of all, there are mixed reports on when National Pizza Month was first established. Some sources claim 1987 was the first year of the month-long celebration. But we’re pretty sure it was first observed in the USA three years prior by the founder of Pizza Today magazine and Pizza Expo, Gerry Durnell. At the time, Durnell was not only a pizzeria owner, but a savvy marketer. Realizing there wasn’t a publication serving the pizza industry, he launched Pizza Today in October of 1984 and created National Pizza Month at the same time to promote his new venture.
Thirty years later, National Pizza Month lives on, here in the USA and in Canada as well. If you’re like most Americans, however, every month is pretty much “pizza month.” On average, close to 95 percent of us eat pizza at least once per month (at KettlePizza, we’re definitely “above average”). If you were to lay out all of the pizzas Americans eat each day, they would cover 100 acres. And about 350 slices per second are consumed in the USA every single day! Phew.
Here are a few more facts about pizza we dug out for you:
- Super Bowl Sunday is one of the top five days in the year for pizza sales. Delivery sales of pizza also spike the most during close Super Bowl games (of course, having a KettlePizza means not having to wait for a busy delivery guy to show up).
- Some of the most popular gourmet pizza toppings include: oysters, crayfish, sprouts and cajun shrimp.
- The longest pizza delivery was from Cape Town, South Africa to Sydney, Australia (wonder if the pizza arrived hot?).
- Moose’s Tooth Pub and Pizzeria in Anchorage is the highest-grossing single-unit independent pizzeria in the nation with $6M annual sales.
- The world’s fastest pizza maker made 14 pizzas in a record two minutes and 35 seconds.
- Scientists report that eating pizza once a week can reduce the risk of esophageal cancer. It’s the tomatoes and olive oil in the pizza.
We’d love to hear how you’ll be celebrating National Pizza Month. Feel free to send us your stories and we’ll share them with the KettlePizza community in the USA and around the world.
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