Pizza Hut to halt use of BHA/BHT, some preservatives and antibiotics

Plano, TX – Pizza Hut has announced plans to remove BHA/BHT from its menu, remove artificial preservatives from cheese and eliminate antibiotics from chicken on its pizzas.

The company announced May 31 in a news release it will remove the following from its list of ingredients:

• butylated hydroxyanisole (BHA) and butylated hydroxytoluene (BHT) from all meats by end of July 2016
• artificial preservatives from cheese by end of March 2017
• antibiotics important to human medicine from chicken for its pizzas by end of March 2017

This comes roughly a year after Pizza Hut became the first national pizza restaurant to remove artificial flavours and colours from its core pizzas in May 2015. Pizza Hut has removed 2.5 million pounds of salt from its ingredients over the last five years.

To further demonstrate the significance of this, Pizza Hut has created a microsite dedicated to its food story at PizzaHut.com/RestaurantQuality. The site spotlights its ingredients, heritage and innovations. Customers can learn about where Pizza Hut ingredients come from and how the pizzas are made.

In addition to these ingredient simplifications, the chain has already eliminated partially hydrogenated oils, also known as artificial trans fats, and MSG. Currently, 15 per cent of the restaurant’s pizzas have just one third of the daily recommended dietary allowance for sodium, Pizza Hut said in the release. Twenty per cent of its pizzas will meet that criteria by 2020.