How Milk Overproduction Helped Create Pizza Hut's Cheesiest Pizzas

Here's a question: Who invented Pizza Hut's 3-Cheese Stuffed Crust Pizza? The answer probably seems incredibly obvious: Pizza Hut, the country's third-biggest pizza chain. But in fact, that's only half the story. It actually turns out that a collaborative effort between the U.S. government and American dairy farmers helped birth this incredibly cheesy pizza (although it has nothing to do with the separate "government cheese" program and a federal cheese cave).

To understand how this works, you'll need to know about something called a "checkoff board." These are government-affiliated agriculture boards that encourage the public to consume more of a specific product, like milk, beef, or blueberries. They're funded by mandatory fees farmers pay (a bit like a tax), but overseen by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). They often create ads encouraging you to buy these agriculture products — "Got Milk" and "Pork: The Other White Meat" are two famous campaigns put on by checkoff boards. But they're also known for helping to create new products or recipes that showcase their respective agriculture products.

That's where Dairy Management Inc. comes in. It's a checkoff board that helps encourage sales and consumption of dairy products. Back in the 2010s, American farmers were pumping out more dairy products than they could sell (here or overseas) and that oversupply was pushing prices painfully low. So Dairy Management Inc. set about inventing new ways to offload all that extra cheese and Pizza Hut's 3-Cheese Stuffed Crust Pizza was one of their big ideas.

Officially speaking, Dairy Management Inc. went into partnership with Pizza Hut to create this pizza — and it wasn't the only time the two entities worked together. After the 3-Cheese Stuffed Crust Pizza in 2013, Dairy Management helped develop a new stuffed crust pizza in 2018 and again around 2021, when it created a Detroit-style pizza with 50% more cheese than previous rectangular pies. Pizza Hut isn't the only chain that Dairy Management has worked with, either, as Taco Bell's Quesalupa and Domino's' Pepperoni Stuffed Cheesy Bread were products of similar partnerships.

In these situations, food scientists from the checkoff board usually work in tandem with a chain's product development department. Together, they figure out practical issues like how to make the cheese properly stretchy and how to ensure a chain's hundreds or thousands of restaurants will cook new inventions consistently.

While fans of heavy duty volumes of cheese might love these products, not everybody is a fan. In 2018, a group of American doctors issued a harsh statement warning against these projects. The issue wasn't just that these fast food products have high levels of unhealthy saturated fat. Rather, it was that the USDA was overseeing the whole thing, as it's legally responsible for what checkoff boards like Dairy Management Inc. do with their money. Ultimately, that's how the government is getting you to chow down on 3-Cheese Stuffed Crust Pizzas.