Let's Celebrate National Pizza Month With Some Fun Pizza Facts!

October 25, 2017

Let's Celebrate National Pizza Month With Some Fun Pizza Facts!

October is officially National Pizza month — or at least it has been since 1987. We figured, "hey, we LOVE pizza! How about we honor one of the world's favorite fast foods with some fun facts about pizza?"

Pizza has been around for over 1,000 years
The fist recorded reference to pizza was in a 10th century Latin text from southern Italy. The text states that a tenant of a certain property is to bring the Bishop of Gaeta 12 pizzas every Christmas Day, and another twelve every Easter Sunday. We wonder if our landlord would accept pizza as a rent payment? 🤔

Everyone loves pizza
Pizza is massively popular, both in the US and around the globe. It's estimated that the US has over 60,000 pizzerias. It's also estimated that 13% of the US population consumes pizza on any given day. Over 5 billion pizzas are sold around the world each year. Pizza's popularity could even take on galactic proportions, since NASA funded and tested a 3D printer that could make pizza for astronauts. The future, here today!

October might be National Pizza Month but...
Pizza sales actually spike on 5 different occasions throughout the year:
- New Year's Eve
- The night before Thanksgiving
- New Year's Day (hello hangover food!)
- Halloween
- Superbowl Sunday (of course)

Superbowl Sunday is by far the most popular day to order pizza. Over 2.5 million pizzas are sold during the Superbowl by Pizza Hut alone.

Is New York City America's Pizza capital? Maybe!
We bet Chicago would like to challenge New York for the title, but New York and pizza go way back. America's first pizzeria was New York's Lombardi's. New York is also where pizza-by-the-slice originated. The first pizzas were sold by the pie, but in 1933 Patsy's Pizzeria started selling by the slice, a trend which caught on quickly with other pizzerias. Today New York is home to over 9,000 pizzerias. Even more interesting, the average slice of pizza has been rising in price in tandem with the price of a NYC subway ticket. Known as the "pizza principle", this phenomena has been going on since the 1960s.

Don't worry, Chicago, you're still the undisputed home of the deep dish. The first known deep dish pizzas were created in Chicago in 1943 by a restaurant that would later become Pizzeria Uno...which is ironic, given that every single Chicagoan we know rants about Uno's inauthenticity.

The Pizza/Celebrity Connection
Several celebrities started out working for pizza places, including Jean Claude Van Damme, Stephen Baldwin, and Bill Murray. In 2013 Macaulay Culkin formed a band parodying songs by the Velvet Underground with pizza-themed song names and lyrics. You can check out a video from Culkin's Pizza Underground below.