Okay, a lot less. But we’re all familiar with the “If your order takes more than 30 minutes to arrive, it’s free” promise of 80s, 90s, and 2000s. (Remember when Spider-Man lost his job for being a minute late?) Pizza places don’t make that promise anymore, but delivery is still essential to pizza places everywhere.
Despite its important role in the pizza industry, delivery is a relatively new development. Let’s take a quick look at its history.
It started with the Queen of Italy.
For most of its history, Italy was a collection of various city-states rather than a single nation. It didn’t become a unified country until 1861. In 1889, King Umberto I and his wife Margherita came to visit Naples, the birthplace of pizza. They wanted to try the local cuisine, so they asked local chefs to bring their specialties to them. One of those specialties was pizza, which Queen Margherita especially liked. She got the Margherita pizza named after her and ordered the first pizza delivery!
Thank the troops for popularizing it in America.
During the Second World War, many American soldiers served in Europe. While they were there, they got to experience the local cuisine. When they returned home after the end of the war, they missed the food they enjoyed in Europe, including pizza. Italian immigrants had already brought pizza to America, but returning soldiers increased the demand and helped spread it throughout the country. Pizza shops popped up all over the country, and many in big cities, like New York and Los Angeles, offered delivery. It was an immediately popular service, and pizzerias across the country also started to offer it. In 1960, the invention of the cardboard pizza box made it even easier to deliver tasty pizzas right to your door.
Online ordering is older than you think.
We were pretty surprised to learn that the first pizza-ordering website went live in 1997. Some people didn’t believe that it was real at first, but once they were convinced, they never looked back. Once smartphones took over in the late 2000s and early 2010s, apps for ordering pizza changed the game again.
