McDonald's Pizza Used To Be A Thing. Here's Why They Stopped Serving It

McDonald's is for burgers: If you want pizza, you've gotta go head someplace like Pizza Hut, right? Not necessarily — at least if you travel back to the late 1980s. Around 1989, the Golden Arches tried to break into the pizza industry, although it was a short-lived experiment generally considered to be a failure.

At that point in time, having conquered the burger market, McDonald's had started looking for new menu items to get more customers. Over the years, the restaurant added items like the Filet-O-Fish and hotdogs (although this also failed). If a commercial for the pizza from the early '90s is to be believed, McDonald's took their pizza seriously, working on the recipe for seven years and testing dozens of pepperoni varieties. When pizza arrived — which was surprisingly called "McDonald's Pizza," rather than "McPizza" — the menu options included pepperoni, cheese, and deluxe (with sausage, peppers, onion, and mushroom).

However, pizza just didn't work for two main reasons — the time it took to cook, and awkward logistics of cooking pizza. It wasn't a speedy product for the chain to churn out — part of the reason it was ditched from menus was that it took some 6 minutes to cook (or up to 11 minutes, according to one semi-official explanation from McDonald's Canada). That doesn't seem like much, but considering that fast food customers typically expect to wait 5 minutes or less to get their orders, that extra cooking time could make a difference, while also potentially holding up orders that would otherwise be ready a lot faster.

Pizza also required special new equipment in the form of pizza ovens. McDonald's put a lot of work into developing an oven that would cook its pizzas from frozen in that (still relatively fast) six-minute timespan, but it would've required a redesign of many McDonald's restaurant kitchens to fit in. The problems continued once the pizza left the oven, as in some restaurants, the pizza boxes were too big to fit out of the drive-thru windows easily — even though the pizzas were already only offered in a smaller, personal size.

McDonald's rolled it out to a little under half of its American restaurants, as well as in Canada, in the early '90s, but quickly killed it off. However, the pizza survived at two locations right up until 2017. One franchisee continued to sell it at two restaurants he owned in Spencer, West Virginia and Pomeroy, Ohio for some two decades longer, resulting in some committed McDonald's fans embarking on long trips to sample it (although reviews suggest it was more "fine" rather than "exquisitely tasty"). That franchisee was eventually forced to take it off the menu by higher-ups in McDonald's corporate offices. Rumors of the pizza's returned surfaced during COVID-19 lockdowns, when pizza chains' profits spiked, but so far, McDonald's never dipped its toe back into the world of pizza.