Good news vegetarians and eco-lovers! Now, America’s original pizza company “Pizza Hut” is evolving towards an improved eco-friendly experience with its round, compostable pizza boxes and alternative meats. Thankfully, companies around the world are being forced to start making their products better for the environment because now this is what the people want.

Recently, Pizza Hut has introduced two innovations, which were tested exclusively at one of their locations in Phoenix. So, what are these innovations?

A new pizza called the Garden Specialty Pizza, which is topped with a plant-based Italian sausage, banana peppers, onions, and mushrooms. The meat alternative sausage is called Incogmeato. “Incogmeato” is made by Kellogg-owned Morningstar Farms.

A round pizza box that improves the quality of the pizzas and can be industrially composted as well.

Marianne Radley, chief brand officer of Pizza Hut said:

At Pizza Hut we don’t do anything halfway and improving the customer experience and delivering a better tasting pizza is our core mission. When we talk about feeding more possibilities we mean it—and I can’t wait to share these two new industry-changing innovations with our customers.

For more than two years, Pizza Hut has been working with startup Zume – a company pioneering the shift to a more sustainable future of food – to design the round box. Zume is best known for its robotic pizza trucks. The new box relies on less overall packaging compared with the standard square pizza box and it interlocks easily to stack compactly. This ensures a smoother delivery, cutting out the employee’s effort that typically must be devoted to folding pizza boxes.

Nicolas Burquier, the chief customer and operations officer of Pizza Hut explained:

The round box was engineered to make our products taste even better—by delivering hotter, crispier pizzas. This box is a win-win—it will improve the pizza-eating experience for our customers and simplify the operating experience for our team members.

How does the round box make the pizza crispier? The box is designed with grooves at the bottom to help catch grease and prevent soggy crusts, while the top latches to keep heat in. Resulting in a hotter and crunchier pizza.

While the round box may be innovative for Pizza Hut, they are not the first who have cut the corners off their pizza boxes. Back in 2004, a round pizza box was introduced by an inventor, John Harvey, he called the box “the Presseal”. Then in 2010, Apple filed a patent for a round pizza box and in April 2019 made a fun three-minute ad called “The Underdogs.” In 2018, World Centric, a sustainable packaging company, unveiled its own version of the circular box. Though, none of these boxes managed to catch on at a scale that even comes close to the dominance of the typical square. However, Burquier is confident that could change.

Burquier said:

One day in the future we’ll reminisce about the idea of round pizzas in square boxes and laugh.

All proceeds raised from the sale of the round box pies during the one-day event in Phoenix on October 23, 2019, were donated to Arizona Forward, a Phoenix-based sustainability organization. Following this event in Phoenix, Pizza Hut plans to look for more ways to expand the box across the country in the near future.