"Tom Ryan still remembers when he was hired by Pizza Hut in 1988 to be its director of new products. Shortly after he started there, he told First We Feast he vividly remembers his company's chief operating officer walking into his office and delivering a warning that stuck with him: "You're in trouble, because everything there is to do with pizza has now been done.""
"He did. Ryan, who holds a doctorate in flavor and fragrance chemistry from Michigan State University, went on to create some of the most successful fast-food innovations of the past three decades. His portfolio includes Pizza Hut's stuffed crust pizza as well as the McDonald's Dollar Menu, the McGriddle, and the McFlurry, plus Smashburger, the burger chain he co-founded in 2007 and sold to Jollibee in 2018."
""Baking a pizza with cheese in the crust and baking a thin pizza is like baking a turkey and a chicken wing at the same time. And so there was a lot of technical work that went into how you design the dough and the pan it's cooked in, so that you can have the [two elements of this] product coming through the same oven in the same amount of time.""
Tom Ryan began at Pizza Hut in 1988 as director of new products and rejected the idea that pizza innovation was exhausted. He holds a doctorate in flavor and fragrance chemistry from Michigan State University and created major fast-food innovations including Pizza Hut's stuffed crust, McDonald's Dollar Menu, McGriddle, and McFlurry, and co-founded Smashburger, later sold to Jollibee. He identified cheese as a primary value driver for pizza and spent about 18 months solving engineering challenges to bake cheese inside the crust, redesigning dough and pans to ensure both crust and pie cooked evenly before the 1995 launch.
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