Tom Ryan still remembers when he was hired by Pizza Hut in 1988 to be its director of new products. Shortly after he started there, he told First We Feast he vividly remembers his company’s chief operating officer walking into his office and delivering a warning that stuck with him: “You’re in trouble, because everything there is to do with pizza has now been done.”
“I went home that night and said, you know, this is how a lot of the world thinks about things,” Ryan told The Denver Post in 2013. “I don’t think like that. I’m gonna change the world.”
He did. Ryan, who holds a doctorate in flavor and fragrance chemistry from Michigan State University, went on to create some of the most successful fast-food innovations of the past three decades. His portfolio includes Pizza Hut’s stuffed crust pizza as well as the McDonald’s Dollar Menu, the McGriddle, and the McFlurry, plus Smashburger, the burger chain he co-founded in 2007 and sold to Jollibee in 2018.
The science of stuffed crust
Ryan’s stuffed crust breakthrough at Pizza Hut came after he found “cheese is the most important thing that drives most people’s value perception of pizza.” But engineering cheese inside the crust presented a technical challenge. His first attempt, he recalled, tasted pretty good, but looked like a tire.
