The Wild Story of How Pizza Hut Got a Pizza to Space
Marketing stunts are supposed to be bold, but one global pizza chain decided that billboards and TV ads weren’t enough. In 2001, Pizza Hut launched what might still be the most unusual delivery in history: a six-inch pizza sent above Earth to the International Space Station (ISS). It cost the company about $1 million.
Food has always played a role in astronaut morale, and getting a pizza into orbit meant solving some tricky problems.
A Logo, a Rocket, and a Giant Price Tag
Pizza Hut struck a deal with Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, during a period when Russia was opening its space program to corporate sponsorships. Just months before the pizza flew, a 30-foot Pizza Hut logo had been plastered on the side of a Russian Proton rocket launched from Kazakhstan’s Baikonur Cosmodrome. The pizza stunt was the follow-up, meant to reinforce the brand’s new, modern image.
The company paid around $1 million for the mission, which covered the costs of testing, preparation, and, of course, the actual delivery. For a company that routinely spent over $100 million a year on advertising, this wasn’t pocket change, but it wasn’t exactly a budget breaker either. And it worked, considering that the brand made global headlines.
Why Salami Beat Pepperoni
Sending pizza into orbit is more complicated than just tossing a box into a supply capsule. The food needed to survive a 60-day test window without spoiling, and that ruled out pepperoni, Pizza Hut’s top-selling topping, since it grew mold during testing. Salami, on the other hand, held up well and became the included ingredient.
The 6-inch thin-crust pizza was vacuum-sealed and heavily seasoned, with extra salt and spices to account for taste bud dulling in microgravity. When the package arrived on the ISS in March 2001, Commander Yuri Usachov heated it in the station’s oven and ate it on camera. The footage was later sent back to Earth as part of the promotion.
Not the Only Food Brand in Orbit
Image via Wikimedia Commons/NASA/Joel Kowsky
Pizza Hut wasn’t the first or last brand to hitch a ride with a space program. In 1985, Coca-Cola and Pepsi tested zero-gravity soda cans on the Space Shuttle Challenger. In the late 1990s, Russian cosmonauts filmed commercials for products as random as Israeli milk. Pepsi also staged a publicity stunt in 1996 by paying Russia a seven-figure sum for cosmonauts on the Mir space station to inflate a giant replica of a soda can.
Still, Pizza Hut’s pizza stunt stood out because it gave the world a quirky first: an actual fast-food item eaten in orbit. Since then, pizza in space has taken on a life of its own. In 2017, astronaut Paolo Nespoli and his crewmates held what became known as a “pizza party” on the ISS. NASA sent up pizza kits with pre-baked crusts, sauce packets, cheese, and toppings ranging from olives to anchovy paste.
The astronauts assembled their pies in microgravity before heating them in the onboard oven and filming the zero-gravity meal for social media.