Pizza Hut
Pizza Hut is an American restaurant chain and international franchise which was founded in 1958 in Wichita, Kansas by Dan and Frank Carney. The company is known for its Italian-American cuisine menu, including pizza and pasta, as well as side dishes and desserts. has 18,431 restaurants worldwide as of December 31, 2018, making it the world’s largest pizza chain in terms of locations. It is a subsidiary of Yum! Brands, Inc., one of the world’s largest restaurant companies. It was founded in June 1958 by two Wichita State University students, brothers Dan and Frank Carney, as a single location in Wichita, Kansas. Six months later they opened a second outlet and within a year they had six Pizza Hut restaurants. The brothers began franchising in 1959. The iconic building style was designed in 1963 by Chicago architect George Lindstrom and was implemented in 1969. PepsiCo acquired Pizza Hut in November 1977. Before closing in 2015, the oldest continuously operating Pizza Hut was in Manhattan, Kansas, in a shopping and tavern district known as Aggie Ville near Kansas State University. The first Pizza Hut restaurant east of the Mississippi River was opened in Athens, Ohio, in 1966 by Lawrence Berberick and Gary Meyers. Pizza Hut’s international presence includes Canada and Mexico in North America, and India (not in the Pizza Hut division, but in the Yum! India division), Bangladesh, Pakistan, Japan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Brunei Darussalam, China (now part of Yum! spinoff Yum China), Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, Myanmar, and Macau in Asia. It was one of the first American franchises to open in Iraq. In Europe they are in United Kingdom, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Germany, Spain, Turkey; in Honduras, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Colombia, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Chile, Brazil, Peru and Ecuador, in South and Central America; in Ethiopia, South Africa and Tanzania in Africa; and in Australia, New Zealand in Oceania. The company announced a rebrand that began on November 19, 2014, in an effort to increase sales, which had dropped in the previous two years. The menu was expanded to introduce various items such as crust flavors and 11 new specialty pizzas. Work uniforms for employees were also refreshed. In 2017, Pizza Hut was listed by UK-based company Richtopia at number 24 in the list of 200 Most Influential Brands in the World. On August 7, 2019.
