Pizza Hut, in its never-ending quest to flout the limits of existing pizza technology, is now offering the pizza cookie. The massive, pizza-sized cookie is Pizza Hut’s newest salvo in its (also never-ending) assault on your waistline.
The pizza cookie is a result of an unholy union between Pizza Hut and Hershey. Officially, it’s known as the Ultimate Hershey’s Chocolate Chip Cookie. Here, they may be using “ultimate” in its proper sense, as anything beyond the size of the pizza cookie ceases then to be “a cookie” and becomes “the proximate cause for your current life re-evaluation.”
Why is Pizza Hut giving you the option to purchase this gargantuan cookie? Reportedly, 70 percent of consumers said that they like to have dessert after pizza, and Pizza Hut doesn’t want them going anywhere else.
Also, USA Today notes that it’s “all about getting more 18 to 34-year-olds to not just share pizza at home, but a hot, gooey cookie to boot.”
It turns out that millennials and the like all want to follow up things like Pizza Hut’s Ninja Turtle pizzas with desert. Because that soda just wasn’t sweet enough.
“Millennials tell us it’s what they want,” a Pizza Hut marketing exec said. “They like to cap off a great pizza with a great dessert.
Plus, millennials, due to their overwhelming inability to be alone and undistracted for more than 30 seconds, prefer to do things in groups. Thus, the logic goes, pair a big pizza with a big cookie and everybody will have more.
“You never get a pizza for yourself,” said Steve Green, publisher of PMQ Pizza Magazine and person who has obviously never seen us on a Thursday. “Now, you take a chocolate chip cookie and make it communal – and you’ve got a party.”
The future for Pizza Hut may hold even more in the way of dessert offerings. The chain already offers cinnamon and Hershey chocolate dunking sticks. Do we sense a Reese’s Pieces confection on the way?