Pizza Hut will soon be serving more than two billion flavors of pizza.
The restaurant chain is introducing a host of new flavors and ingredients into its menu as part of a larger overhaul that Pizza Hut hopes will finally bring back the sales it lost in the last eight quarters.
On Nov. 19, all Pizza Hut restaurants across the United States will be using a new menu that Pizza Hut calls "The Flavors of Now," which will feature new crust flavors, sauces, drizzles and premium ingredients that customers can combine together to create their own customized flavor.
Stefanie Tuder of Good Morning America tried out some of the ingredients and said that the crust flavors and drizzles are the most exciting additions.
The 10 crust flavors, such as Toasted Asiago, Honey Sriracha and Salted Pretzel, are actually just brushed into the edge of the pie instead of being baked directly into the dough.
Pizza Hut will also introduce new crust flavors for a limited time; the first of which are Ginger Boom Boom and Get Curried Away.
"My favorite of these was the Salted Pretzel crust -- you really can't go wrong with adding butter and salt to anything," Tuder says. "I didn't dislike any of them, though. It's a nice way to add more flavor to your meal."
Customers can choose from five base sauces: Classic Marinara, Premium Crushed Tomato, Garlic Parmesan, Buffalo Barbecue and Honey Sriracha, and have four drizzle choices, including Balsamic, Honey Sriracha, Barbecue and Buffalo.
Pizza Hut is throwing in a bunch of new premium ingredients, such as fresh spinach, sliced banana peppers and Peruvian cherry peppers that Pizza Hut was careful to tell Tuder were actually sourced from Peru.
For those who can't make up their minds on which among the two billion flavors to pick, Pizza Hut has done the hard work by offering 11 new flavors to sample the new ingredients. Customers with a penchant for everything spicy can order the 7-Alarm Fire or the Sweet Sriracha Dynamite.
Veggie lovers can have the Garden Party to enjoy a pizza topped with the new Premium Crushed Tomato sauce and a sprinkling of fresh vegetables on a Hut Favorite crust brushed with balsamic drizzle. The new menu will also include five Skinny Slice flavors that Pizza Hut says will have 250 calories or less per slice.
The restaurant will be keeping old-time favorites in its menu, such as the Meat Lover's and Veggie Lover's, but the new additions are designed to help the company make a comeback in a restaurant industry where customers are increasingly demanding to customize the food they eat.
The success of restaurants like Chipotle has prompted other food chains to offer their customers the ability to design their own food. Some branches of McDonald's in California, for instance, are testing out a new feature that lets their customers build their own burgers.
The Plano, Texas-based Pizza Hut has been struggling to keep up sales growth for the past two years at many of its biggest locations because of stiff competition from other pizza chains, such as Domino's and Papa John's.
The Pizza Hut makeover, said to be the biggest in the pizza industry, also includes a new logo, a new website at pizzahut.com and more relaxed uniforms for workers, who will be doing away with their polo shirts and black pants to wear t-shirts and jeans instead.
