Pizza Hut has embarked on a fine-dining mission to showcase to its customers that its ingredients are extremely high quality.
To prove just that, the brand invited acclaimed chef Yanis Yahoui to their 'back of house' to hand-pick from their everyday ingredients, to craft and serve a fine-dining tasting menu to eight culinary experts from across the region. The guests arrived expecting a curated gastronomic experience from the chef and were told there would be a twist, but no one knew exactly how the evening would unfold.
What happened was a first-of-its-kind experiment: a genuine Supper Club where every dish was connected by one common element, which the guests had to guess over the course of the evening.
As each dish arrived, the table buzzed with speculation. The flavours surprised them. The textures impressed them. The guessing intensified. Yet none of them could connect the dots.
Every dish, every sauce, garnish, and reduction was made entirely from Pizza Hut's ingredients. The same real ingredients are used daily in their kitchens.
"We wanted our quality ingredients to speak for themselves, so we stripped away the branding and presented them in a new form. By serving them 'out of context,' we challenged culinary experts to see if they could detect 'fast food', or if the finest quality would shine through," said Caroline Wylie, Marketing Manager, Pizza Hut MEA.
The event was created to launch the second phase of Pizza Hut's food provenance platform, WhatsInTheBox.me, and highlight the quality of each and every ingredient that goes into their pizzas.
"There are many misconceptions and beliefs about fast food, including Pizza Hut, and we wanted to challenge these in a fun and engaging way", Fausto Pelanti, Head of Marketing, Pizza Hut Middle East, commented.
"Fine dining and Pizza Hut are two worlds that rarely meet, but by bringing them together, we used the element of surprise to communicate our quality message with a fresh approach".
Followers were pleasantly surprised to find out that Pizza Hut's Mozzarella comes from grass-fed cows in New Zealand, their tomatoes are vine-ripened, their flour is locally milled in the UAE, their dough is made fresh in-store multiple times a day, and their fruits and vegetables are seasonally-sourced and chopped daily to ensure freshness – all quality standards you'd expect in a fine-dining kitchen, but never from your favorite pizza joint. That's where the surprise lies.
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