What Papa John's Doesn't Want You To Know About Their Food

Yahoo.com ^ | August 13, 2013 | Melanie Warner

[SamAdams76]

Food companies understand that Americans are increasingly interested in buying food that actually seems worth eating. We want food that's some degree of fresh, healthy, natural or otherwise of higher quality. It's for this reason that you see images of plump fruit decorating packages of cereal bars and the greenest broccoli you've ever laid eyes upon appearing on boxes of frozen dinners. At Burger King, you don't order a mere salad - it's a Chicken Caesar Garden Fresh Salad. Those chips aren't just cheese-flavored - they're Harvest Cheddar Sun Chips, with "harvest cheddar" an entirely meaningless term. Few companies have applied this appeal more literally than Papa John's, which for years has boasted "Better pizza. Better ingredients." Printed on every Papa John's pizza box is a little story: "When I founded Papa John's in 1984, my mission was to build a better pizza," says "Papa" John Schnatter. "I went the extra mile to ensure we used the highest quality ingredients available - like fresh, never frozen original dough, all-natural sauce, veggies sliced fresh daily and 100 percent real beef and pork. We think you'll taste the difference." After all, who wouldn't want fresher, better ingredients in their pizza? A great deal of the food we currently eat, both from the supermarket and at chain restaurants, is comprised of ingredients created as cheaply as possible (tomatoes chosen for their shipability, not flavor; chicken as bland as a pizza box because the bird only lived for 10 weeks and ate a monotonous diet) and highly processed additives, many of them not even technically edible...

[freedom462]

That is the thing with these restaurant chains - you can claim that you and everyone you know hates their cheap, awfully prepared food and how you and everyone else says it is below your dignity, but considering the obscene amount of money Papa Johns makes, somebody’s going there on a regular basis. And presumably, that somebody is anyone who wants even semi decent pizza and doesn’t live in Chicago or NY. And that is a fairly good sized demographic Papa John’s has tapped into.

I am not sure why Freepers so easily jumped on a bandwagon started by someone who is clearly a leftist statist who wants authoritarian rules when it comes to how companies that serve food of any kind should be run. I would hope around here we are not so easily swayed by what we read form liberal yahoo tools.

[Finatic]

Thanks Joe,

I was thinking the same thing.

I had a Papa’s Pickup Special and its still marginal pizza at best but I will occasionally buy PJ when its convenient to kick a few bucks to a positive business.

[freedom462]

Unfortunately, when we don’t live in Brooklyn or Chicago, it kinda is all we got in many, if not most, cases.

[GeronL]

I have not been happy since they stopped using crunchy sandwich pickles in favor of those horrible soft pickles at all the burger places.

[Steve_Seattle]

"The business is so successful because the owner is a conservative with a capital “C”. That’s why this woman is writing about Papa John’s instead of one of the other pizza chains."

That's exactly it. I've never had Papa John's pizza because there isn't one within five miles of where I live, but I suppose it's not radically different from Papa Murphy's, which I think is ok. And is it some kind of revelation that pizza isn't exactly health food? Do we need some Democracy Now! crap sandwich to tell us that?

[Dr. Sivana]

Pizza capital of the US: Chicago.

When Chicago was just getting around to having pizza widely available in the late 40s, the NY-NJ-CT tri-state area was already on its second generation (e.g. Modern Apizza in New Haven, CT was founded in 1938, Pepe's and Sally's, much earlier.)

The nation's pizza is not novelty pizza (stuffed). I speak as someone who worked as a cook at Edwardo's (second tier). The customer's did not want pizza, they wanted a convenient way to serve their cheese and spinach goop.

The stuffed pizza is a feminist pizza, inverting the natural order with the sauce on top of the cheese, and separated by an extra layer of crust.

[DesertRhino]

Wait! The article also had breaking news about Olive Garden!

“Olive Garden wants you to believe that eating at one of their restaurants means you’re getting authentic Italian cuisine. Many of its “chefs” have been trained at the company’s Culinary Institute of Tuscany, located, we are told, in a “quaint 11th century Tuscan village.” But Italian cuisine is notoriously fresh, individually prepared and lacking in shortcuts.”

WTF??? Olive Garden is not a fresh individually made meal, lovingly made by a little kind Italian woman who peeks from the kitchen to see if I’m happy? I feel so duped! Another dearly held illusion, shattered. Glad she ripped the curtains down!! Press on brave Journalist in Boulder Colorado. Keep fighting, O holy knight of truth/

[mountn man]

Brooklyn has pizza?

You need to come to Chicago and try a real pizza ;)

[count-your-change]

Two things make a great pizza...a ton of toppings with lots of cheese and it’s ready when promised.

Washed down with a quart of beer...Well, what more could you want?

[mountn man]

Tune in next week, when this writer bitches about not being able to find a pizza for cheaper than $25.

Or that they take EBT cards.

[napscoordinator]

The pizza I can’t stand is Pizza Hut. I know I am in the minority, but I can’t stand it. Papa John’s is ok mostly cause of the sauce.

[Tijeras_Slim]

Voted best in Albuquerque one year... Advertises as the "best smelling singlewide in the world". Next to Molly's.

[Steve_Seattle]

Seattle has several independent Neapolitan-style, brick-oven places, and they are pretty good, but none are in my area so I need to be very motivated to go to any of them. But I do prefer very thin crust with sparse cheese and toppings, both because of taste and because I’m Type II diabetic. But I have to hold my nose at a couple of those places because I detest snobbery and pretentiousness, and anything that’s high-end or “gourmet” tends to be buried beneath a great deal of pretentious baloney. After all, it’s just pizza.

[mountn man]

Two things make a great pizza...a ton of toppings with lots of cheese and it’s ready when promised.

Washed down with a quart of beer...Well, what more could you want?

2 quarts of beer?

[RetSignman]

Papa John’s “pizza” isn’t pizza.
+++++++
When I was in Italy and Sicily I found out what real pizza tastes like. One of the best parts of their pizza was the bread and pizza sauce.

The ‘hoagies’ were made with round Muffalta bread and fresh ingredients and the only places I’ve found in the U.S. where pizza’s and hoagies came close to them are made by Italians who stuck to the the old recipes.

Hard to find these days because of competition from crap joints like papa johns.

[Tijeras_Slim]

I likes Pizza Hut when I worked there... made myself a 3 pound small thin crust pepperoni.

[Steve_Seattle]

Pizza Hut pizza arrives dried out and oily, although I suppose that sounds like a contradiction. .

[cripplecreek]

I was watching the Detroit cop show (Low Winter Sun) a few weeks back and was happy to see them give a shout out to the lowly Coney Dog and its Detroit origins.

And that’s where the argument usually starts.

However I’m from Jackson county where Todoroff’s restaurant is and that claim to be the originator. However I also liked the real Coney Island restaurant Coney dogs.

And then there’s the Flint Coney Dog....

[Caipirabob]

What Papa John's Doesn't Want You To Know About Their Food

The attacks on obamacare objectors will proceed immediately...

[TBP]

I’m an old New Yorker and a pizza aficionado. Of the “mass market” pizza chains, I think Papa John’s is the best.