Pizza Hut’s engineering department partnered with students in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University in order to enhance thin crust pizzas.
Michelangelo Fichera, Madelaine Else, Brennan Lee, AJ Bizub, Michael Tershakovec and Brendan Shannon contributed to the project.
The team was tasked with preserving the crunch in Pizza Hut’s Thin N’ Crispy® pizzas, and they sought out ways to improve the packaging design in order to prevent over-steaming. Among the methods the team used to study the packaging were:
- filming the boxes with an infrared camera to study how heat was escaping the box, and
- studying the cardboard itself under an electron microscope.
Ultimately, the students discovered that oil absorbent material in contact with the bottom crust would improve crispiness.