The Economics of Everyday Things: Pizza (Box) Time!

Summary

The Indicator from Planet Money: The Economics of Everyday Things – Pizza (Box) Time!

Released on November 17, 2024

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Introduction

In this insightful episode of "The Indicator from Planet Money," host Adrian Ma introduces a special feature from the Freakonomics Radio Network titled "The Economics of Everyday Things." The episode delves into the unassuming yet vital world of pizza boxes, exploring their history, design, economic impact, and environmental considerations. Through interviews and expert insights, the podcast reveals the complex economics behind a commonplace item that delivers billions of pizzas annually across the United States.

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Scott Wiener's Pizza Box Obsession

The episode centers around Scott Wiener, a Guinness World Record holder for the largest collection of pizza boxes, boasting over 1,800 units from every continent, including an intriguing box from Antarctica. His passion began in 2008 during a trip to Israel, where he noticed a uniquely designed pizza box that diverged from the flimsy white boxes he was accustomed to in suburban New Jersey.

Notable Quote:

"Anything that's taken for granted, you know, there's more depth to it. And with pizza boxes, once you scratch that surface, you realize, oh, there's so much more going on here."
— Scott Wiener (02:40)

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The Evolution of the Pizza Box

Pizza boxes have undergone significant transformations since the inception of pizza in Naples, Italy. Originally transported in copper containers called stufas, pizza delivery shifted to paper bags post-World War II. However, the surge in pizza's popularity as a party food in mid-20th century America necessitated a more robust packaging solution.

Notable Quote:

"As pizza got more popular and it became more of a party food, really around the middle of the 20th century, that's when we switched to the box."
— Scott Wiener (03:25)

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Domino's Corrugated Box Innovation

The pivotal moment in pizza box history arrived in the 1960s when Tom Monahan, founder of Domino's Pizza, sought a solution to the shortcomings of flimsy boxes during high-volume deliveries. Partnering with a Detroit-based manufacturer, Domino's introduced the corrugated cardboard pizza box. This design featured an outer liner, an inner liner, and a fluted piece of paper sandwiched in between, enhancing heat retention and structural integrity.

Notable Quote:

"His whole idea was, I need something that could stack really neatly, that's gonna hold onto the heat, and it's not gonna cost so much."
— Scott Wiener (04:18)

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The Dominance of Packaging Companies

Today, the pizza box market is dominated by large packaging conglomerates like Westrock, headquartered in Sandy Springs, Georgia. Westrock controls the entire supply chain, from forestry and paper production to corrugated converting and final delivery of boxes to pizzerias nationwide.

Notable Quote:

"There's about 3 billion pizza boxes a year that the US market consumes."
— Patrick Kivitz, Westrock Corrugated Division (05:33)

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Design and Functionality of Pizza Boxes

Effectiveness in pizza box design focuses on maintaining pizza temperature, moisture resistance, and ease of assembly. Engineers at Westrock continually refine box designs to optimize ventilation, reduce condensation, and ensure boxes are easy to fold and stack, minimizing labor costs for pizza chains.

Notable Quote:

*"The pizz

a companies want the pizza to arrive at their consumers houses at the right temperature. So heat, reservations, moisture resistance, ventilation, making sure that there's not too much condensation on the inside of the lid, the height of the box, the integrity of the box, are important."*

— Patrick Kivitz (07:02)

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Innovations and Improvements

Numerous attempts have been made to enhance the conventional pizza box. Innovations include boxes that transform into storage containers or tables, incorporate built-in utensils, and even adopt round shapes. One standout design from Mumbai introduces advanced ventilation channels within the corrugated structure, allowing steam to escape and reducing humidity without compromising the box's integrity.

Notable Quote:

"With 25 different vent holes, it's really brilliant. It's beautiful."
— Scott Wiener (10:48)

Despite these advancements, widespread adoption remains challenging due to the minimal cost implications for large-scale pizza operations.

Notable Quote:

"As soon as costs go up by 2 cents, nobody will use it. They don't make economic sense."
— Scott Wiener (11:35)

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Recycling and Environmental Impact

The lifecycle of pizza boxes extends beyond their initial use. Contrary to common belief, most cardboard pizza boxes are recyclable up to seven times. However, contamination from food residues often discourages recycling efforts. The market value for old corrugated cardboard (OCC) has fluctuated, impacting the economics of recycling and encouraging manufacturers like Westrock to repurpose materials efficiently.

Notable Quote:

"Historically, the messaging was that a pizza box is too greasy and dirty to recycle, so you need to throw it away."
— Eric Nelson (12:50)

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Personal Reflections

Scott Wiener shares a personal irony in his passion for collecting pizza boxes while maintaining that no pizza tastes as good when eaten directly out of the box. His extensive collection symbolizes a deeper appreciation for the often-overlooked aspects of everyday items.

Notable Quote:

"I have 1,800 of them in a storage unit that I pay for. I'm obsessed with them, but I do not eat pizza out of pizza boxes."
— Scott Wiener (14:04)

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Conclusion

"The Economics of Everyday Things: Pizza (Box) Time!" offers a comprehensive exploration of the humble pizza box, highlighting its significant role in the pizza industry, the intricate design and manufacturing processes, ongoing innovations, and environmental considerations. Through Scott Wiener's unique perspective and expert interviews, the episode underscores how a seemingly simple item embodies complex economic and logistical challenges.

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Produced by: Sarah Lilly
Assisted by: Lyric Bowditch
Mixed by: Jeremy Johnston and Greg Rippin

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For more engaging stories about the economics of ordinary things, tune into "The Indicator from Planet Money" weekday afternoons.

Transcript

[NPR Host]

Npr.

[Adrian Ma]

What's up, Indicatorinos? It is Adrian Ma here, and today we are sharing an episode of another podcast, one that we've enjoyed and that we think you'll like, too. It's called the Economics of Everyday Things. It's made by the Freakonomics Radio Network. And on each episode, their host, Zachary Crockett, uncovers the hidden stories behind ordinary things, like stock photos, Girl Scout cookies, and cashmere sweaters. In this episode, you're about to hear Zachary cracks the lid open on the humble pizza box. Hope you enjoy it.

[Zachary Crockett]

Back in 2008, Scott Wiener was on a trip to Israel and had a curious awakening in a restaurant.

[Scott Wiener]

I noticed that pizzeria had boxes on the wall. It was this yellow, bright yellow with orange stripes. Crazy pizza box. Growing up in suburban New Jersey, all pizza boxes were flimsy, white, smudgy red ink. And, you know, this was a yellow box. It just. It didn't seem legal. It just. It stuck with me. And from then on, anytime I saw a box that looked different from the ones I grew up with, I. I would save them.

[Zachary Crockett]

Pizza boxes became Scott Wiener's obsession. He now holds the Guinness World Record for the world's largest collection of them, more than 1800 in total. Pizzerias from all over the world have sent him their packaging.

[Scott Wiener]

I have every continent. I have a box from Antarctica who.

[Zachary Crockett]

Makes pizza in Antarctica.

[Scott Wiener]

Apparently, they have a commissary that has a pizza station. They sent me one with maybe 30 or 40 signatures of scientists working at the McMurdo Station.

[Zachary Crockett]

Wiener's collection is a tribute to an everyday item that is often underappreciated by pizza enjoyers across the country, which is almost all of us. Americans consume billions of pizzas every year, around £23 worth per person. The majority of those pizzas are ordered for delivery or to go. And the boxes the pizzas are transported in have to be carefully engineered to uphold the integrity of the pies inside.

[Scott Wiener]

Anything that's taken for granted, you know, there's more depth to it. And with pizza boxes, once. Once you scratch that surface, you realize, oh, there's so much more going on here.

[Zachary Crockett]

For the Freakonomics radio Network, this is the economics of everyday things. I'm Zachary Crockett. Today, pizza boxes. The pizza box is a relatively modern invention. In Naples, where pizza was invented, bakers used to transport their products in copper containers called stufas. Eventually, they were replaced by paper bags laid out horizontally. After World War II, the US experienced a pizza awakening. Scott Wiener knows a lot about this History.

[Scott Wiener]

As pizza got more popular and it became more of a party food, really around the middle of the 20th century, that's when we switched to the box, which at first was like a pastry box, like if you get a pound of cookies, it's that type of box. Between southern Italy and the United States, pizzas shifted, became larger, became more of a sharing food. And if you have 16 inch boxes that are flimsy, a stack of those, it doesn't make sense.

[Zachary Crockett]

When modern pizza delivery really took off in the 1960s, those flimsy boxes became a big problem for high volume transport. So a fellow named Tom Monahan, founder of then regional pizza chain Domino's, decided to do something about it.

[Scott Wiener]

His whole idea was, I need something that could stack really neatly, that's gonna hold onto the heat, and it's not gonna cost so much.

[Zachary Crockett]

Domino's worked with a manufacturer in Detroit. The solution they came up with was a box made out of corrugated cardboard, which is a much sturdier material.

[Scott Wiener]

There's an outer liner, an inner liner, and then in between the two, there's a fluted piece of paper, which is what gives it its thickness and it's what allows heat retention and it gives it strength.

[Zachary Crockett]

The box was called the Michigan style. It has a front flap that folds over with little side ears that tuck into the cracks and keep the box shut. 60 years later, this is more or less the same box design most pizza companies still use today. When you go to a pizza shop, the odds are pretty good that they buy their boxes from a packaging conglomerate. A few big players control the pizza box market, including Westrock, based in Sandy Springs, Georgia. Patrick Kivitz runs the company's corrugated division.

[Patrick Kivitz]

We make essentially every corrugated box that you're familiar with. You know, from an E commerce box to anything that you can sell.

[Zachary Crockett]

Kivitz says that pizza boxes are a major part of the business.

[Patrick Kivitz]

When you do the math, about 1.7% of the corrugated volume is pizza boxes. So there's about 3 billion pizza boxes a year that the US market consumes.

[Zachary Crockett]

WestRock is one of the largest pizza box manufacturers in America. They sell to pretty much everyone from Domino's to mom and pop neighborhood joints. The company controls the entire pizza box supply chain.

[Patrick Kivitz]

So we have our own forestry, we have mills in our system where we start producing the paper, our corrugated converting plants, where we start making the corrugated materials, that's then eventually cut, printed, and they arrive at our customer sites cleanly.

[Zachary Crockett]

Westrock has a team of graphic designers who make custom artwork for clients. Boxes they also sell boxes with generic artwork to restaurants that don't care as much about branding or can't afford custom art. Scott Wiener says that if you look closely enough, you'll see the same designs pop up at different pizzerias.

[Scott Wiener]

The typical pizza box is a clip art box, and that's, you know, the image of the chef, the image of the pizza that's steaming. Maybe there's a border of typical pizza ingredients around the edge of the box, like the boot of Italy, that kind of stuff. You still find that on most generic pizza boxes.

[Zachary Crockett]

Westrock also employs engineers who work on the functionality of boxes.

[Patrick Kivitz]

The pizza companies want the pizza to arrive at their consumers houses at the right temperature. So heat, reservations, moisture resistance, ventilation, making sure that there's not too much condensation on the inside of the lid, the height of the box, the integrity of the box, are important because, you know, transportation, sustainability. We have as many boxes in a delivery vehicle as possible so that, you know, we reduce the delivery costs. So it's not as trivial as you may think.

[Zachary Crockett]

Another key consideration in the design process is to make sure boxes are easy to set up. They're sold to pizza chains flat and have to be assembled by the pizzeria's employees. Every second of that labor counts.

[Patrick Kivitz]

The trends that we've seen over recent years is really about how do you make them easier to set up so that the large pizza brands can reduce labor when you fold them to the final pizza box configuration. It's important that that goes as fast and effective as possible.

[Zachary Crockett]

At the International Pizza Expo, an industry convention in Las Vegas, Westrock hosts a competition to find the world's fastest pizza box folder. Perhaps nobody takes pizza box agility more seriously than Domino's. The chain has made it a central part of their identity in commercials and advertisements. Domino's has its own patented box, which is designed to be assembled in a few seconds. Wiener has firsthand experience with it.

[Scott Wiener]

A few years ago, I got a job at a Domino's essentially for research. And part of my job every day when I showed up was fold pizza boxes. And those flimsy boxes take about 20 seconds, 25 seconds to fold. The standard corrugated, take me about 7 or 8 seconds, but the Domino's box is about 5 seconds.

[Zachary Crockett]

Domino's delivers 1.5 million pizzas every day, so saving 3 seconds per box adds up to more than 1200 hours of labor. That's great for business, but when it comes to improving the consumer's experience, pizza boxes still have a ways to go that's coming up when he's not collecting pizza boxes. Scott wiener runs Scott's Pizza tours in New York City. He eats pizza on a weekly basis and he's found that even the best boxes on the market are flawed.

[Scott Wiener]

The problem with pizza is that it's a baked product, it's a bread, but it's also a high humidity product with tomato and cheese and whatever topping you have. So you know bread and humidity are enemies. The box is not good for the pizza. It traps in steam. Sometimes you do get some breakdown of the paper and then you taste a little cardboard aftertaste.

[Zachary Crockett]

In recent years, there have been numerous efforts to reengineer the pizza box from the ground up.

[Scott Wiener]

Somebody has made a version of it that breaks down into a storage container for your leftover pizza plus plates. Then there's a version of it that turns into its own table where the lid flips over and it becomes a stand. Then there's the one that's got the built in spatula that has a perforated edge so you can use it to cut up the pizza a little bit smaller. It's totally bonkers.

[Zachary Crockett]

A number of inventors have patented round pizza boxes. Even the technology giant apple took a stab at one for use in its corporate cafeterias. It's shaped like a clamshell and it's made out of compressed fiber. But the best pizza box design that Wiener ever saw came out of Mumbai, India.

[Scott Wiener]

It's an amazing box that plays with the corrugated structure. It also adds ventilation that creates these channels within the fluted medium, which allows steam to escape indirectly. So this way steam gets out, the relative humidity inside the box lowers without it being open. With 25 different vent holes, it's really brilliant. It's beautiful.

[Zachary Crockett]

These boxes are all better in some way than the existing models on the market. But it's unlikely that any of them will disrupt the status quo. Small to medium sized shops spend around 30 cents per box. The big guys order higher volumes and spend much less. Keeping expenses low is more important than marginally improving the pizza experience.

[Scott Wiener]

You know, normal humans just think, oh, the box that works better should be the one that we all use. And as soon as costs go up by 2 cents, nobody will use it. They don't make economic sense.

[Zachary Crockett]

Probably the most important part of the pizza box supply chain is what happens to boxes after a pizza is consumed. Eric Nelson has been in the recycling and compost business for more than a decade. He spent seven years working in the waste reduction program at the University of Kansas. And the pizza box was among his chief concerns.

[Eric Nelson]

We would see, you know, 20 or 30 pizza boxes for a dorm room party, or three or 400 for a back to school event.

[Zachary Crockett]

Just constant stream of pizza coming in.

[Eric Nelson]

Yeah, it was definitely one of our larger waste streams on campus.

[Zachary Crockett]

When he was on campus, Nelson says he saw all kinds of stuff inside of pizza boxes.

[Eric Nelson]

Anything from cheese stuck to the pizza box to a lot of times the parmesan and red pepper packets were in there. We saw a lot of pepperoncinis, a lot of marinara.

[Zachary Crockett]

These tarnished boxes rarely ended up in the recycling bin.

[Eric Nelson]

Historically, the messaging was that a pizza box is too greasy and dirty to recycle, so you need to throw it away.

[Zachary Crockett]

In reality, that's a myth. In most municipalities, the cardboard pizza boxes are made out of can be recycled up to seven times grease. And all the boxes that do get recycled are broken down and tied up into giant bales that weigh more than £1,000. Those get sold on the spot market as a commodity, just like oil or wheat under the name OCC or old corrugated cardboard. Recently, the going rate for this old cardboard has fallen as low as $30 a ton, down from well over 100 in previous years. That's good news for pizza box manufacturers like Westrock, who buy it and turn it into new boxes.

[Eric Nelson]

So this is bought by paper mills, and they have a recipe basically where they'll add the mixed paper bail, they might add some virgin pulp, and then it's turned into a slurry and pressed into paper.

[Zachary Crockett]

For Eric Nelson, the pizza box is a part of a beautiful cycle. But Scott Weiner has a different take.

[Scott Wiener]

I mean, the irony of my life is that I collect pizza boxes. I have 1,800 of them in a storage unit that I pay for. I'm obsessed with them, but I do not eat pizza out of pizza boxes. No pizza will ever taste as good coming out of the box than it did going into the box.

[Zachary Crockett]

For the Economics of Everyday Things, I'm Zachary Crockett. This episode was produced by Sarah Lilly with help from Lyric Bowditch and mixed by Jeremy Johnston and Greg Rippin.

[Scott Wiener]

Nothing repulses me.

[Zachary Crockett]

Okay. Pineapple.

[Scott Wiener]

Absolutely fine.

[Zachary Crockett]

Anchovies.

[Scott Wiener]

Delighted with it. Had it two days ago.

[NPR Host]

The Freakonomics Radio Network. The hidden side of Everything.

[Adrian Ma]

That was an episode of the Economics of Everyday Things from the Freakonomics Radio Network. And I bet you will never look at a pizza box the same way. I know I won't. If you like that, they've got lots more stories about extraordinary, ordinary things like sports mascots, romance novels, cemeteries, even pistachios. You can find them wherever you get podcasts. We'll be back tomorrow with regular indicator episodes covering everything from the housing shortage to President Elect Trump's plans to try and solve that shortage to what we can expect from the Global climate conference called COP 29.

[NPR Host]

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