Here's Why Pizza Boxes Are Still Getting Slammed

Who would have thought that pizza boxes would represent one of the major engineering challenges of the 20th century, a dilemma now stretching well into the 21st century? But, here we are. Sadly, as lamented recently in The Atlantic, the pizza box is not much improved from the first delivery boxes from the 1940s. Then, your pizza was delivered, or you picked it up from your neighborhood pizzeria, in a thin cardboard box. Not much different from the cake boxes still in use today, those first pizza boxes were hugely susceptible to weakening from the steam of a hot pizza and bending under its weight. And so, you were left to struggle against losing your fresh, hot pizza on the driveway — or worse, on the kitchen floor.

In the 1960s, recounts The Atlantic, the Domino's pizza chain commissioned a packaging company to manufacture pizza boxes out of much thicker corrugated cardboard — you know, like your Amazon delivery boxes — to better protect your pizza during pickup or delivery. Corrugated cardboard — two layers of cardboard, separated by an undulating layer of cardboard — also provides better insulation to keep your pizza hotter for longer. And, it allows some steam to escape, meaning your pizza is less soggy coming out of the box. But still, even a corrugated pizza box will degrade the quality of its contents, with trapped steam leaving it at least somewhat soggy, and as The Atlantic suggests, imparting "a rubbery grossness to the cheese."