This Pizza Trend Has Been The Life Of Parties Since The '90s

As one of America's most beloved foods, pizza culture experiences abundant fads. In the early 2010s, artisan Neapolitan pies — crafted with only a few ingredients and baked in an uber-hot wood–burning oven – made a splash nationwide. Into the 2020s, the en vogue style morphed into the Tokyo influence, a similar build, but with a different dough and smoky flavor.  Flash back to the 1990s, though, and the newly arrived pizza trend came a little cozier: A stuffed crust.

It's a straightforward pie modification that comes with an easy-to-understand appeal. In lieu of scarfing down or throwing away dry crusts, roll some melted cheese in there and voilà; pizza end might just become the best part. The build was first popularized by Pizza Hut in 1995, when the chain integrated mozzarella into the pie's edge.

The move proved hugely successful, increasing the chain's sales by several hundred million dollars. Ads, including a famed clip featuring Ringo Starr, played on the airwaves. Only a few years later, the invention became among the chain's most popular offerings, a crucial advantage in the '90s pizza industry. The style of pizza-making spread beyond the chain, with a frozen option arriving in 2001 courtesy of DiGiorno. Today, the stuffed-crust pizza showdown continues, with Domino's, Papa John's, and Pizza Hut offering their own renditions. It's a pie-making technique that arrived in the 1990s and hasn't faded since.

With so many different types of pizza in the U.S., it's perhaps surprising that the stuffed crust only arrived in the 1990s. After all, breaded mozzarella sticks had already appeared on pizza menus a few decades prior. Not to mention, Chicago-style pizza included a layer of mozzarella as far back as the 1940s. Nevertheless, Pizza Hut claims to have invented the stuffed crust in 1992. The chain's technique is credited to Patty Scheibmeir, a food scientist who first devised a way to bake mozzarella into dough, all while employing a standardized pizza conveyor system.

However, such a stuffed-crust origin is highly contentious. Shortly after Pizza Hut's rollout, inventor Anthony Mongiello sued the brand, citing his 1987 stuffed crust patent. Nearly a decade earlier, Mongiello had noticed the abundance of excess crusts and created a method to incorporate cured meats and cheese into them, even initially titling the invention "stuffed crust." Mongiello approached pizza chains — including Pizza Hut — to sell the concept in 1988, to no avail. Ultimately, Mongiello lost the lawsuit due to patent wording details regarding pizza-slicing. Nevertheless, his initial stuffed crust momentum lives on, with pizza giants like Domino's joining the trend in 2025. Now ubiquitous, it's hard to believe the stuffed crust technique is only a few decades old.