Who Created the Stuffed Crust Pizza? It’s Complicated.

In March 1995, the fast food chain Pizza Hut launched a new product destined to redefine the pizza business. Under the headline “The Next Big Thing in Pizza? Try ‘Stuffed Crust’,” the New York Times reported that Pizza Hut’s innovation lay “at the razor edge of pizza-dough technology and mozzarella management.” By laying a ring string cheese around the rim and folding over the dough, the chain had created a circular pocket of melty goodness where previously only dry crust was to be found.

The hype was justified: The stuffed crust added $300 million to Pizza Hut sales over the following year. As chains like Papa John’s and Little Caesars copied the concept — not to mention the countless smaller businesses and frozen food manufacturers who also picked up on the idea — the stuffed crust became quite a money-making invention.

But did Pizza Hut actually invent it? One Brooklyn man alleges he was cut out of his slice of the pie — that he invented stuffed crust pizza first and that he has the patent to prove it.

In the latest episode of Gastropod, co-hosts Cynthia Graber and Nicola Twilley use the legal battle over the stuffed crust to examine a crusty issue: can you actually patent a pizza? Is food innovation — a recipe, a new pretzel shape, or even a flavor — something that can be protected as intellectual property? In the case of stuffed crust pizza, the answer turned out to be yes — and also no — for reasons that tell us something about how Americans imagine both innovation and food.

Anthony Mongiello — known to his friends as the “Big Cheese” — got the idea for stuffed crust pizza by accident. When he was just 18 years old, Mongiello found himself making pizza at the request of a friend’s mom. He overestimated how much dough he needed and ended up making a pie with an enormous, puffy crust. When Mongiello cut into the pie, he saw huge air pockets in the crust — and he had an idea. As he told Gastropod, “I was like, Wow. If there was something inside here, that would be great!”

One of the first people Mongiello shared his idea with was his father, who had a track record of cheese-based innovation himself: he had created a machine to mold fresh mozzarella by hand. One of the first things Mongiello Senior told his son was to find a way to protect his new idea.

“He told me, ‘You have to protect it the best you can,’” Mongiello told Gastropod. “He said, ‘You have to try and think of any way that someone could look at this and try and change it and then steal your concept from you.’ And that was the reason he directed me to get a patent.”

In the United States, a patent is just one of several ways that you can try to protect your intellectual property. Unlike, say, a copyright, which protects songs, books, and other creative endeavors, patents are something you can apply for the very moment you have a great idea for a new design or process. If the patent office approves, the holder of a patent has the exclusive right to make that thing as described for 15 or 20 years, depending on the type of patent. The idea behind giving these, intellectual property experts told Gastropod, is to encourage innovation.

“The argument, at least, is that society benefits from this because we reward the innovator by giving them this exclusive period of time to use their innovation,” says Valerie Flugge, a professor of business law at California State University, Northridge.

To get a patent, Mongiello had to prove the stuffed crust pizza was useful, novel (meaning nobody else had stuffed a crust like this before), and non-obvious. New York University professor Chris Sprigman, whose research focuses on intellectual property law, translated that last requirement to Gastropod using a sandwich as an example. A non-obvious sandwich is just legalese for a sandwich so innovative that “a person having ordinary skill in the art of sandwich making wouldn’t just think of this from the sandwiches that we’ve understood before.”

At the time of his big idea, Mongiello was working in construction, and seeing his crew’s lunchtime pizza boxes filled with leftover crusts gave him solid evidence that stuffed crust pizza could be useful — no more wasted dough! It took longer to prove that stuffing the crust of a pizza was novel: A patent examiner, at one point, told his attorney that “it sort of infringes on an apple turnover or a ravioli,” Mongiello said.

Those officials were eventually convinced, and, in 1987, Mongiello was awarded patent number 4661361, for his “Method of making a pizza.” It was time to make some dough! But, without a pizza chain of his own, he called the industry players — Domino’s, Papa John’s, Little Caesar’s — to see whether they wanted to license his patent. Pizza Hut was the only one who seemed interested at first — but, after he sent his patent to the corporate R&D office, they too told him they were going to pass.

Imagine Mongiello’s surprise when, years later, he got a phone call: a friend who’d seen the buzz about the launch of the stuffed crust pizza wanted to congratulate him on selling his idea to Pizza Hut. Mongiello, who had done no such thing, reached out to the company to correct what he saw as a mistake and was offered $50,000 for his idea. Instead, he decided to take the pizza giant to court.

So, was the Big Cheese cheated out of his idea? And does the patent process really promote innovation in the food world in the first place? You can be the judge, when you join Gastropod to explore a number of bizarre cases from the world of culinary intellectual property, including the legal battles over Pocky, Dippin’ Dots, Uncrustables sandwiches, and that beloved 1990s cartoon character named CatDog. Listen to “Can You Patent A Pizza?” wherever you get your podcasts!