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UK Pizza Hut delivering 'mood-enhancing' pizza on 'Blue Monday'
January 13, 2017 by S.A. Whitehead — Food Editor, Net World Media Group
In case you're unable to roll out of bed this time of year and didn't know it, this coming Monday is Blue Monday, the most depressing day of the year, according to Sky Travel, the British marketing travel agency that invented it 12 years ago for people in the iced-up Northern hemisphere.
Now, what's that got to do with the pizza restaurant business? Well, everything if you happen to be in the U.K. on Jan. 16, because that's where Pizza Hut marketers have come up with a way to make hay out of the year's darkest day with its British LTO, "mood-enhancing pizza," according to British food publication, FoodBevMedia.
The "therapeutic" pie was created by a Pizza Hut UK nutrition expert using foods shown to increase production of the brain chemicals that make people happier, including serotonin (tuna), dopamine (mozarella) and oxytocin and endorphins (produced by the array of colors on the pizza's yellow corn, red onion and green olive topping). Now lest you think you are reading a "fake news," item, rest assured that food and medical nutrition science does back up those claims, though whether eating those ingredients in a pizza actually lifts mood, is not clear.
The chain's British arm has even designed the brand's first "multi-sensory eating experience" to go along with the ingestion of this therapeutic pizza, according to the article, which says the mood-enhancing pizza orders are also accompanied by a new piece of audio-visual art that includes babies laughing, kittens purring and waves lapping against a shore. The scientific proof on this claim comes from work Pizza Hut UK did with a team of Innovationbubble behavioral psychologists identified the top 10 audiovisual cues that make people happy, using Harvard-created methodology, according to the article.
"Humans assess everything we see on an emotional survival dimension, so we quickly judge if something is a threat or likely to make us pleased, happy or excited," Innovationbubble’s Simon Moore said in the article. "Using this theory, we worked closely with Pizza Hut UK to identify the visual cues and sounds that makes people the most happy to compliment their mood-boosting pizza."
Pizzamarketplace.com has an inquiry into Pizza Hut's corporate offices in Louisville to find out how the UK team is giving customers access to the video and whether the same promotion might be headed elsewhere around the globe.
This is, however, a fine example of the trend toward more"functional food" written about by Fastcasual.com Managing Editor Cherryh Cansler earlier this year.
About S.A. Whitehead
Pizza Marketplace and QSRweb editor Shelly Whitehead is a former newspaper and TV reporter with an affinity for telling stories about the people and innovative thinking behind great brands.
