On September 20th, Pepperoni Pizza Day recognizes the most popular pizza ever created. The day celebrates the pizza enjoyed by young and old alike.
While pizza comes with many different toppings, pepperoni is the single most popular pizza. Whether you like your pizza Chicago Style or New York Style, thin and crispy or deep dish, top it with pepperoni!
- According to legend, Raffaele Esposito created the first pizza in June of 1889. The Queen of Italy, Margherita of Savoy, inspired the pizza maker. He created the Pizza Margherita to honor the queen and topped the pizza with tomatoes, basil, and mozzarella. The colors represented the Italian flag.
- What is pepperoni? Famous foodies around the country describe it as an American variety of Italian salami. Like salami, it is a mix of spiced, dried pork and beef – heavier on the pork – stuffed into a casing.
- Pepperoni is a variety of salami, a thinly sliced sausage made from pork and beef. It gets its fiery, bright-red color and spicy, smoky flavor from paprika – a powder made from ground-up red pepper pods – and chili peppers.
- While the name “pepperoni” is borrowed from the Italian word for bell peppers, pepperoni is a purely American invention that emerged at immigrant-owned butcher shops in the early 1900s.
- Pepperoni was first used on American pizza sometime between the First and Second World Wars. The invention was likely a way to use up the scraps of pork and beef set aside when carving out the various steaks, roasts, and chops.
- In 1830 pizza truly began with the opening of the world’s first pizzeria. Named Port’Alba, the pizzas were cooked in an oven lined with lava from Mount Vesuvius, a volcano located on the Bay of Naples.
- 252 million pounds of pepperoni is used on pizzas each year, in the US.
- That is quite an astounding amount, and when breaking down the numbers, that comes to an average of 689,780 pounds or 344 tons of pepperoni eaten every day!
- The average pizzeria uses roughly 55 pizza boxes per day.
- Some popular pizza toppings in Japan are squid and Mayo Jaga (mayonnaise, potato and bacon)
- 36 percent of all pizza orders want their pizza topped with pepperoni.
- 350 slices of pizza are eaten each second in the U.S.
- The top 5 pizza sales days are Super Bowl Sunday, New Year’s Eve, Halloween, The night before Thanksgiving, & New Year’s Day.
- One of the biggest days for pizzerias around the country is Super Bowl Sunday. Pizza is a major staple to this sports event, with an average of 2,500,000 pizzas being sold just from Pizza Hut alone.
- Domino’s delivery drivers will log about 4 million miles on Super Bowl Sunday
- Americans eat approximately 100 acres of pizza a day or about 350 slices per second.
- Roughly 1,000 years ago herb-and-spice-covered circles of baked dough grew exceptionally popular in Naples, Italy. Known as focaccia, these rounds were served as an appetizer or a snack.
- The regular thin pizza crust is still the most popular crust, preferred by 61 percent of the population. Thick crust and deep dish tied for second, at 14%. Only 11 percent of the population prefers extra thin.
- Currently, there are 18,431 Pizza Huts globally.
- Former World War II soldiers that were stationed in Italy grew a heavy liking to pizza. They brought the idea back to the United States and made it the extremely popular dish it is today.
- According to the United States Department of Agriculture, about 13 percent of Americans eat pizza daily. That’s about one in eight Americans eating pizza on any given day.
- One in Six Males, ages 2 to 39 Eat Pizza for Breakfast, Lunch or Dinner on any Given Day.
- Consumption of Pizza Has Increased American’s Consumption of Cheese by 41 Percent Since 1995
- In the Big Apple, the price of a slice of pizza has been rising in parallel to the price of a New York City subway ride. This is known as the “Pizza Principle,” and has been going on since the 1960s, according to Business Insider.
- “Happy” pizza, which is pizza cooked with marijuana, is an extremely popular dish in Cambodia.
- Scottish pizzerias have a common offer that needs to hop over the pond: deep-fried pizza. Instead of baking the pizza, Scottish pizzerias offer slices to be deep-fried,
- Even astronauts crave pizza in space: NASA commissioned BeeHex, an Austin-based tech company, to create a 3D printer that makes food, including pizza. This 3D printer can make a pizza in half of the time that the average pizza chef can and has a variety of toppings and sauces, including vodka sauce and burrata cheese.
- One 18-inch Pizza Gives You More Pizza Than Two 12-Inch Pizzas. This may seem off, but it’s true: the area of a circle increases with the square of the radius (aka the diameter). Therefore, the larger the diameter of the pizza, the more pizza you get per slice.
- 3 Billion Pizzas Are Sold in the U.S. Alone Each Year.
- There Are 9,000 Pizzerias in New York State.
- The Average Slice of Pizza Is 25 Percent Protein
- Pizzerias are heavily abundant in the United States with 70 thousand of them coast-to-coast.
- The Average American Eats Over 23 Pounds of Pizza a Year
- UberEATS found that most Americans consume pizza as their Saturday night dinner.
- According to an Italian study published by the International Journal of Cancer, people who ate pizza at least once a week had less chance of developing cancer. Frequent pizza consumption reduced the risk of developing oesophageal cancer by 59 percent, as well as risk of developing colon cancer falling by 26 percent and mouth cancer by 34 percent. The researchers assume that this is due to the tomato sauce’s high lycopene content.
- Domino’s really gives its customers a variety of pizza combinations: about 34 million, to be exact. You can basically order the pizza of your cheesy dreams at this pizzeria chain.
- In 1984, Papa John’s founder, John Schnatter, sold his car to buy pizza-making equipment and set it up in a broom closet, according to the company’s website. 33 years later, it’s one of the most recognizable brands in the pizza industry.
- Papa John’s Was the First Pizzeria Chain to Offer Online Ordering
- Pizza Today magazine reports that square-shaped pizza, also known as Sicilian or Grandma-style pizza, is actually the original shape of the Italian dish. It also contained Romano instead of Mozzarella cheese.
- A common topping on pizza in Australia is eggs, and pizzas with the topping are referred to as Aussie pizza. They also usually include bacon and there is actually a recipe for it on the Australian Government’s website.
- Women are twice as likely as men to order vegetarian toppings on their pizza.
- The first ever (or one of the first) online purchases was a pepperoni and mushroom pizza from Pizza Hut. All the way back in August of 1994, the pizza chain began selling pizzas on the internet. It is commonplace today, but they were clearly years ahead of their time.
- The first known documentation of the word “pizza” is from 997 A.D.
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