The Economics of Everyday Things: Pizza (Box) Time!
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What's up indicate reno s IT is a dream ma here and today we are sharing episodes, another podcast, uh, one that we even enjoyed and that we think you'll like to. It's called the economics of everyday things. It's made by the economics radio network, and on each episode, their host exegi crock uncovers the hidden stories behind ordinary things like stock photos. Girls got cookies and cashmere sweaters in this subsidiary about to hear that re cracks the lid open on the humble pizza box. Hope you enjoy IT.

Back in two thousand eight, Scott winner was on a trip to israel and had a curious awakening in a restaurant.

I noticed that pizza had boxes on the wall IT was this yellow, bright yellow with orange stripes crazy pizza box growing up in suburban new jersey. All pizz boxes were flimsy White smuggling ring and know this was a yellow box IT just IT didn't seem legal and I just it's stuck with me and from then on, any time I saw a box that looked different from the ones I grew up with, I I would save them.

Pizz boxes became scot winner's obsession. He now holds the guinness world record for the world's largest collection of them, more than eighteen hundred in total. Pizza, as from all over the world, have sent him their packaging.

I have every continent, and I have a box for an article .

who makes pizz and antarctic.

Apparently they have a commissary that has a pizza station. They sent me one with baby, thirty or forty signatures of scientists working at the mic. Murder station .

winners collection is a tribute to an everyday item that is often underappreciated by pizza enjoyers across the country, which is almost all of us americans consume billions of pizzas every year, around twenty three pounds worth per person. The majority of those pizzas are ordered for delivery or to go, and the boxes the pizzas are transported in have to be carefully engineered to uphold the integrity of the pies inside.

Anything that's taken for granted, you know there's more deaths to IT. And with pizza boxes, once you scratch that surface, realize, oh, there is so much more going on here.

For the for economics radio network, this is the economics of everyday things. I'm exact cricket today, pizza boxes. The pizza box is relatively modern invention in naples, where pizzas invented Bakers used to transport their products in copper containers called stuff, as eventually they were replaced by paper bags laid out horizontally.

After world war two, the U. S. Experienced a pizza awakening. Scott winner knows a lot about this history .

as pizz got more popular and IT became more of a party food really around the middle of the twenty years century. That's when we switch to the box, which at first was like a pastry box. Like if you get a pound of cookies, it's that type of box between southern italy in the united states, pizz shifted, became larger, became more of a sharing food. And if you have sixteen, eight boxes that are flimsy, a stack of those IT doesn't make sense.

When modern pizz delivery really took off the thousand, nine hundred and sixty, those flimsy boxes became a big problem for high volume transport. So a fellow named tom monahan, founder of the regional pizza chain dominos, decided to do something about IT.

His whole idea was, I need something that could stack really neatly that's gonna ld on to the, and it's not gonna cost so much.

Dominos worked with a manufacturer, and detroit, the solution they came up with was a box made out of corroded ted cardboard, which is a much sturdier material.

There's an outliner, an interlining. And then in between the two, there's a flooded piece of paper, which is what gives IT its thickness and is what allows heat retention and IT gives its strength.

The box was called the michigan style IT as a front flap that falls over with little side years that tuck into the cracks and keep the box shut. Sixty years later. This is more or less the same box design most pizza companies still use today.

When you go to a pizza shop, the odd's are pretty good that they buy their boxes from a packaging. A few big players control the pizza box market, including west rock based on Sandy springs, georgia patch. Chavez runs the company's corrugated division. We make .

essentially every corrugated box that you are familiar with, you know, from e commerce box to anything that you can sell.

Chavez says that pizza boxes are a major part of the business.

When do the math? About one point seven percent of the corrected volume is pizer boxes. So this about three billion pizza boxes a year that the U. S. Market consumes.

What struck is one of the largest pizza box manufacturer in america. They sell to pretty much everyone from dominos to moment pop neighborhood joints. The company controls the entire pizza box supply chain.

So we have our own forestry. We have meals in our system where we start producing the paper are corrode ted converting plans where we start making the corrected materials that then eventually caught printed, and they arrive at our customer size cleanly.

Western has a team of graphic designers who make customer artwork for clients boxes. They also sell boxes with generic c artwork restaurants that don't care as much about branding or cantarell customer stock. Winner says that if you look closely enough, you'll see the same designs pop up with different pizzas.

The typical pizza box is a clip art box. And that you know the image of the chef, the image of the pizza that stemming maybe there's a border of typical pizz ingredients around the edge of the box, like the boot of italy, that kind of stuff. You still find that on most generic pizz boxes.

What struck also employs engineers who work on the functionality of boxes.

The pizza companies want a pizza arrive at customers houses the right temperature, so heat reservation, moisture resistance, ventilation, making sure that is not too much conversation on the inside of the lid, the height of the box, the integrity of the box. Important because, you know, transportation sustainability, we have as many boxes in a delivery vehicle as possible so that you know we reduced the the delivery costs. So it's not this trivial as you may think.

Another key consideration in the design process is to make sure boxes are easy to set up. They are sold to peto change flat and have to be assembled by the pizza's employees every second of that labor counts.

The trance that we've seen over recent years is really about how do you make them easier to set up so that the large pizza brand can reduce labor when you fall them to the final pizza box configuration. Important that that goes as fast and effective as possible.

At the international pizza expo and industry convention in last vegas, west rock hosts the competition to find the world's fastest to pizzas folder. Perhaps nobody takes pizza boxes ity more seriously than dominos. The chain has made an essential part of their identity and commercials and advertisements and forward. Dominos has its own patented box, which is designed to be assembled in a few seconds. Weener has first hand experience with IT.

A few years ago, I got a job at a dominos essentially for research, and part of my job every day when I showed up with fold pizza boxes. And those filthy boxes take about twenty seconds, twenty five seconds to fold the standard corrugated. Take me about seven or eight seconds, but the domina boxes, about five seconds.

Dominos delivers one point five million pizzas every day, so saving three seconds per box adds up to more than twelve hundred hours of labor. That's great for business. But when IT comes to improving the consumers of experience, pizzo xe still have a ways to go that's coming up.

When he's not collecting pizza boxes, Scott winner runs Scott pizza tours in new york city. He eats pizza on a weekly basis, and he's found that even the best boxes on the market.

our flood, the problem with pizza is that it's a big product, is a bread, but it's also a high humidity product with tomato and cheese and whatever topping you have. So in a bread and humidity are enemies. The box is not good for the pizza, a trappin steam. Sometimes you do get a some breakdown of the paper and then you you taste a little cardboard after taste.

In recent years, there have been numerous efforts to re engineer the pizza box from the ground up.

Somebody has made a version of IT that breaks down into a storage container for your leftover pizza plus plates. Then there's a version of IT that turns into its own table where the lid flips over and IT becomes a stand. Then there's the one that got the built in spatch la that has a perforated edge so you can use IT to cut up the piz a little bit smaller. It's totally bockers.

A number of inventors have patented around pizza boxes. Even the technology giant apple took a stabbed one for use in its corporate cafeterias. IT shapes like a climb shell, and it's made out of compressed fiber. But the best piz box design that winner ever saw came out of mumbai, india.

It's an amazing box that plays with the corrugated structure. IT also adds ventilation that creates these channels within the fluid medium, which allows steam to escape indirectly. So this way steam gets out, the relative humidity inside the box lowers without IT being open with twenty five different vent holes. Really brilliant. It's beautiful.

These boxes are all Better in some way than the existing models on the market, but it's unlikely that any of them will disrupt the status quo. Small to medium size shops spent around thirty cents s per box. The big guys order higher volumes and spend much less. Keeping expenses low is more important than marginally improving the best experience.

You know Normal humans just think, oh, the box that works Better should be the one we all use. And as soon as cost go up by two cents, nobody will use IT. They don't make economic sense.

Probably the most important part of the pizza box supply chain is what happens to boxes after a pizzas consumed. A Nelson has been in the recycling and composed business for more than a decade. He spent seven years working in the waste reduction program at the university of kansas, and the pizza box was among his chief concerns.

We would see, you know, twenty or thirty pizza boxes for a dorm party or three or four hundred for a back to school event, just constant stream of people to come in in yeah was definitely of our larger wave streams on campus.

When he was on campus, no son says he saw all kinds of stuff inside of pizza boxes.

Anything from chee stuck to the pizz box to a lot of times the palmer, jon and red pepper packets were in there. We saw a lot of pepper and see is um a lot of marine. These .

tarnished boxes rarely ended up in the recycling bin.

Historically, the messaging was that a pizz box is too greece y and dirty to recycle so you need to throw out away.

In reality that's a myth. In most municipalities, the cardboard pizz boxes are made out of can be recycled up to seven times greece. And all the boxes that do get recycled are broken down and tied up into giant bales that wait more than a thousand pounds.

Those get sold on the spot market as a commodity, just like oil or weed under the name O C C or old corrugated cardboard. Recently, going rate for this old cardboard has fAllen as lost thirty dollars a ton, down from well over a hundred in previous years. That's good news for pizz x manufacturer like west rock who buy IT and turn IT into new boxes.

So this is bought by paper mills and they have a recipe basically when they add a mixed paper bail, they might add a virgin pope and then its turned into a slurry, impressed into .

paper for arkell's, the pizz box is a part of a beautiful cycle, but stat winner has a different take.

I mean, the irony of my life is that I collect p to. I have eighteen hundred of them in a story unit that I pay for. I'm obsessed with them, but I do not eat pizza out of pizza xs. No pizz will ever taste as good coming out of the box than I did going into the .

box for the economics of everyday things. I'm actually crack. This episode was produced by silly with help lic footage and mixed by jerrem johnston and greg rippon.

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The free economics radio network, the hidden side of everything.

that was an episode of the economics of everyday things from the for economics radio network. And i've pt, you will never look at a pizza the same way. I know I won't if you like that they've got lots more stories about extraordinary ordinary things, like a sports mascots, romance novels, cemeteries, even pettitoes. You can find them wherever you get podcasts will will be back tomorrow, with regular indicated episodes covering everything from the housing shortage to president elect trumps plans to try and salt that shortage to what we can expect from the global climate conference called cop twenty nine.

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