What Pizza Hut Does With Leftover Food

You might enjoy your pizza cold the next morning as leftovers, but excess pizza has an important job to do in the local community when it comes to Pizza Hut. The takeout and delivery giant owned by Yum! Brands takes a stand when it comes to food waste — a problem that accounts for between 30% and 40% of the total edible food supply in the United States (per Recycle Track Systems). While some food retailers lack a cohesive plan for dealing with ingredients and prepared foods that weren't sold at the end of the night, Pizza Hut utilizes its built-in Harvest Program to connect the pizza, breadsticks, pasta, and other yums with hungry individuals in the surrounding locality. 

Ideally, when pizzas are cooked and not picked up, or refused by customers because there was an error with the preparation, these pizzas are held aside for pickup by community partners. The USDA states that cold pizza is good for three or four days in the fridge, meaning that there should be plenty of time to get it to somebody who needs it. 

Pizza being a near-universal comfort food isn't a rare fact you never knew about it, so Pizza Hut takes its leftover, unclaimed, or mistake pizzas (and other items) and works with local food banks and hunger-relief organizations through a partnership with Food Donation Collection to distribute them to those in need. In the quarter century between 1992 and 2017, Pizza Hut locations donated over 100 million pounds of food to the communities that support these restaurants. In individual restaurants, workers package leftover food into special containers to preserve its freshness. These containers are picked up by food banks within 10 miles of the restaurant, and the pizza is given new life.

There have been instances where social media has taken large chain restaurants to task for covert food waste despite outspoken promises by these conglomerates that mitigation efforts were in place. The sad fact of the matter is that, in most cases, tossing leftover food is not only easier for restaurant employees, but also satisfies (irrational) corporate fears about potential lawsuits springing from consumers eating said food and potentially getting sick from it. Preserving food for community donation costs manpower hours and requires storage, and the truth is that many retailers simply can't be bothered. 

We have no way of knowing what goes on at every Pizza Hut in America, but doing an internet deep dive for social media gossip turned up only sporadic hits for individual stores wasting large amounts of food, which we choose to take as a positive sign. In fact, search results actually turned up accounts of local stores being lauded by their communities for the good they were doing, like a Pizza Hut in Helena, Alabama. 

Again, we have no proof that Pizza Hut is an absolute paragon of the industry, but we like what we are seeing. If you know the best ways to reheat pizza (not the microwave), cold pizza can be a real gift. Many Pizza Hut locations are walking the walk when it comes to reducing food waste by packing leftover pizza and getting it out to the needy in local communities. It's a laudable effort in a reality where billions of pounds of food waste hit the trash every year across food retail.