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.
So you’d think if Papa John’s was really following a different model, they’d want to tell us all about it. Too bad they don’t. Those “better ingredients”: Good luck finding out what they are. Unlike the packaged products you buy at the supermarket, restaurant food isn’t required to list ingredients. Many fast food chains, like McDonald’s, Taco Bell and Subway, do voluntarily provide them, in part for indemnity against lawsuits and in part because they realize some of their customers actually want to know what they’re eating.