The chain is testing the Impossible Supreme Pizza, made with plant-based sausage from Impossible Foods, in three markets starting on Monday. The announcement makes Little Caesars the first nation-wide pizza chain to offer a meatless substitute to its menu.
The Impossible Pizza will be available in three markets, including Ft. Meyers, Florida; Albuquerque, New Mexico; and Yakima, Washington. “You don’t just do it to be first … For us, there has got to be a business reason behind it,” Little Caesars’ chief marketing officer, Ed Gleich, told Business Insider.
Gleich says the move is based on trends and customer requests, reports the Detroit Free Press. “We were seeing it in our product line, more and more people were ordering non-meat pizzas in general,” said Gleich.
Little Caesars is joining the plant-based protein trend with a pizza topped with non-meat sausage. WTVR CBS 6 Richmond (@CBS6) May 20, 2019
“When you’re a chain our size, you watch things and we are looking for things that aren’t necessarily a niche but have wide enough appeal that we can put in all of the stores and sell enough of it and it is a high-quality product.”
Impossible Foods does the impossible
Redwood City, California-based Impossible Foods was founded in 2011. The company aims to give people the taste and nutritional benefits of meat and dairy without the negative health and environmental impacts associated with livestock products.
Its signature product, the Impossible Burger, was launched in July 2016. The company teamed up with Burger King, creating the Impossible Whopper that is being test-marketed in 59 locations throughout the United States. The Impossible Whopper includes a flame-grilled, plant-based burger patty, which comes with lettuce, tomato, pickle and onion toppings.
Burger King’s chief marketing officer Fernando Machado says that customers and employees cannot tell the difference between the original Whopper and the new one, noting: “People on my team who know the Whopper inside and out, they try it and they struggle to differentiate which one is which.”
Little Caesars’ corporate staff tasted the Impossible burger in October 2017. By October 2018 the chain had decided it was going to add a meat substitute to the menu, meatless sausage. The result was a product Impossible Foods created specifically for Little Caesars – Impossible Sausage.
Impossible Foods adds meatless sausage to Little Caesars pizza pZoyq83062
— New York Post (@nypost) May 20, 2019
“Normally companies like to sell you the product they have, not the one they’re going to invent,” Gleich said. “But these guys could not have been more open to it.” Impossible Foods created more than 50 prototypes with Little Caesars before settling on the right one.
“I’m confident that the Impossible Supreme Pizza will go down as one of the most surprising and satisfying menu sensations of 2019,” Little Caesar president and CEO David Scrivano said in a statement sent to Fortune. “This is likely just the beginning of plant-based menu items from Little Caesars.”
