Do you remember McDonald’s Pizza? If you don’t, you’re apparently not alone. In fact, if you’d Googled “mcdonalds pizza” before March of this year, your resources would have been scarce. Since then, the subject briefly went viral – there’s even a podcast extensively devoted to the subject.
The reality is, McDonald’s Pizza was test marketed in over 500 locations between 1989 and 1991. From the jump, it seems like it was doomed to fail – a special oven was needed that took up precious space, it reportedly took 11 minutes to cook (a lifetime in fast food minutes, obviously), and special drive-thru windows had to be installed so the family-size pizzas could fit through.
In the end, it did indeed meet its demise, for any of these reasons or just because it wasn’t popular enough. But one franchisee refused to get the message, and continued to sell pizzas in two locations – Pomeroy, Ohio and Spencer, West Virginia. Unfortunately, McDonald’s corporate eventually caught wind of this rogue hero, and those two locations shut down pie production in August of this year.
McDonald’s Pizza is now well and truly gone, even if you never knew it was there to begin with.
The pizzas were available in personal or family size, and the toppings offered were cheese, pepperoni, sausage, and deluxe (sausage, peppers, mushrooms, and onions). Here’s the thing – for the first time, I’m writing about a food I never actually had the opportunity to taste.
From all the resources I’ve gathered, feelings about McDonald’s Pizza range from “bland” and “the sauce was too sweet” to fond memories of it rivaling the taste of big chain places like Pizza Hut. For the record, the podcaster previously mentioned got to try it this year, and called it “everything I had hoped for”.
I knew about the two locations still serving McDonald’s Pizza before they were forced to stop, but I just didn’t have the resources to travel 2,000 miles to try it. I sure wish I could have, though, just for the novelty of the experience.
Given the logistics, I doubt we’ll ever see McDonald’s Pizza again, and that’s probably for the best. While I never did get to try it, I doubt it could compete not only with the big chains that deliver today but also with the ability to order from mom ‘n’ pop places that can now deliver via apps like DoorDash.
