The '90s Pizza Trend That's Still Going Strong Today

The year was 1995. Pizza Hut — already the country's largest pizza chain — attempted a crust technique that would have a huge impact on the industry going forward. That was the stuffed crust pizza, and the method was to simply wrap one side of the dough around a circular piece of string cheese.

Over the next year, this cheese-filled crust skyrocketed Pizza Hut's sales with an additional $300 million. The success of the stuffed crust was undeniable, but it took a while for other major chains to follow suit. Papa Johns launched its "Epic Stuffed Crust" in December 2020. Little Caesar's experimented with limited-time stuffed crust offers, but it wasn't until June 2021 that the chain introduced its "ExtraMostBestest" pepperoni pie with a stuffed crust filled with cheese and extra pepperoni. In 2025, Domino's got in on the stuffed crust craze, finally realizing Pizza Hut's 1995 launch wasn't just a brief fad.

Today, all of these chains continue to have their own versions of stuffed crust. While a large stuffed crust pie at Pizza Hut cost $9.99 in 1995, they're a bit pricier now. A stuffed crust single topping pizza ranges from as low as $11 (Little Caesars) — the cheapest stuffed crust we could find in the market — up to the most expensive offering from Domino's at around $16.74. Both Pizza Hut and Papa John's offer a stuffed crust for around $15 per pie — and we think that Papa Johns' Garlic Epic Stuffed Crust is truly epic.

Depending on who you believe, Pizza Hut might not have invented the stuffed crust after all. Anthony Mongiello — only 18 years old at the time — came up with the idea in the 1980s after making a pizza with too much dough in the crust. The result was an oversized, puffy crust with air pockets that begged for a filling. He told his dad — who had already invented a machine to mold fresh mozzarella — and his dad told him to patent the idea. That's exactly what Mongiello did in 1987.

He pitched the idea to Pizza Hut, Papa Johns, Little Caesars, and Domino's. At first, Pizza Hut was interested but later turned down Mongiello's stuffed crust idea. So when Pizza Hut launched its stuffed crust campaign in 1995, Mongiello approached the chain again about the origination of the idea. Pizza Hut offered him $50,000. He passed on that meager amount and, in turn, sued Pizza Hut for $1 billion, but a judge later dismissed the case. This whole story was documented in the 2023 documentary, "Stolen Dough." Don't feel too bad for Mongiello, though. He's gone on to become a successful entrepreneur as the CEO of Formaggio Cheese.

Thirty years after Pizza Hut's initial launch, the stuffed crust can be found all across the nation — on the menus of the largest chains to mom and pop pizza shops to the frozen pizza aisles at every major grocery store. So whether you give Pizza Hut or Anthony Mongiello the credit, there's no doubt that the stuffed crust pizza will go down as one of the major inventions in the history of the pizza industry.