What’s more, the FDA’s proposed regulations required pizzerias to post calories for a whole pie, rather than a single slice. “It is sticker shock,” says Marla Topliff, president of Rosati’s Pizza in suburban Chicago. “When somebody looks at nutritionals on a large pizza and they see 10,000 calories, they may be reluctant to buy it.” Most large pizzas don’t typically top 4,000 calories, even fully loaded, but Topliff’s point is well taken: While many people might eat more than a single slice in a sitting, few eat the whole pie.
Domino’s hired a lobbyist in Washington to fight against menu labeling, while Liddle and her counterparts sounded the alarm far and wide. They recruited franchise owners, suppliers, and other big chains such as Papa John’s and Little Caesars, representing roughly 20,000 restaurants. Created in 2010, the American Pizza Community devoted itself to advocating for the pizza industry and fighting the aspects of menu labeling that they found most objectionable. The APC held weekly conference calls to discuss strategy, and in June 2012, members flew to Washington to schmooze members of Congress and their staff — “the first wave of an ongoing effort to inform leaders about the industry,” according to an APC press release.
Although Domino’s plays a commanding role, the APC presented itself as a voice for local pizzerias, which it calls “the quintessential small business.” Specifically, it encouraged legislators to support an alternative to the FDA’s proposed regulations. Called the Common Sense Nutrition Disclosure Act, that alternative would have eased some of the menu-labeling restrictions, like allowing primarily delivery-based pizzerias to provide calorie information online. That bill hasn’t yet passed, but the FDA ultimately eased up on one of the regulations most irritating to the pizzeria owners: They can now post calorie information by the slice. (The FDA also says only standard menu items need to be labeled, not every possible combination.)
It was a modified win for pizza. Still, Liddle wasn’t happy. In response to the FDA’s final regulations, released last fall, she put out a statement on behalf of the APC, complaining that the FDA had provided only “small concessions that don’t solve many of the regulation’s problems.” She went on to promise that the pizza lobby would not give up this fight: “The APC will now enlist the help of allies to right this wrong.”
At the same time pizzerias were fighting menu labeling, frozen-pizza makers were defending their own territory: the school cafeteria. Along with promoting menu labeling, Wootan, the nutrition activist, had also begun pushing for better nutrition standards for federally subsidized school lunches, where almost $500 million worth of pizza is served each year. For Wootan and her allies, the goal was to add more fruits and vegetables to school lunches while cutting back on junk food — specifically pizzaand French fries — or at least making it healthier.
In 2010, Congress approved a nutrition update for federally subsidized school lunch that’s been championed by Michelle Obama. When the Department of Agriculture released the details the next year, they included a seemingly obscure provision that increased the minimum amount of tomato paste required to be counted as a vegetable serving — and lit a torch under the frozen-pizza lobby. (As of now it operates independently from the fresh-pizza lobby, perhaps because Domino’s described frozen pizza as “the root of all evil” on its pizza boxes a few years ago.)
“For school lunch purposes, a slice of pizza was considered a serving of vegetables”
Under the existing rules, tomato paste is given extra credit toward a vegetable serving because it's made of concentrated tomatoes. So 2 tablespoons of tomato paste — roughly the amount on a slice of pizza — is counted as a half a cup, or the equivalent of one vegetable serving. For school lunch purposes, a slice of pizza was considered a serving of vegetables, a point first made by Wootan in 2011 that became a late-night punchline. The Department of Agriculture’s new rules, though, would have stopped giving tomato paste extra credit: From now on, 2 tablespoons would count as 2 tablespoons. Kraig Naasz, CEO of the American Frozen Food Institute, a trade group that lobbies for frozen pizza, says the tomato paste rule was simply a crafty way to get pizza out of schools: “None of our members wanted the federal government to say, ‘Pizza is bad for you.’ You would have been telling an entire generation that pizza is a food you shouldn’t consume.”
In a 2011 letter to the USDA, the National Frozen Pizza Institute — frozen pizza’s trade association and an arm of Naasz’s organization — said the amount of tomato paste would need to be increased so dramatically that it would overwhelm pizza and make it “incapable of holding cheese and other toppings.” And in testimony before Congress in August of that year, Karen Wilder, chief nutritionist for Schwan Food, said many foods packed with nutrients, including pizza, risked elimination from school lunch by the proposed rules. A subsidiary of Schwan supplies 70 percent of school lunch pizza.
In November 2011, Congress blocked the Department of Agriculture from making some of the proposed nutrition changes. Since then, reductions to sodium and increases in whole grains have been delayed — which the frozen-pizza lobby favored — and the USDA gave up on closing the tomato paste loophole altogether. Wootan conceded the round: “When it comes to school food, pizzais king. It was the pizza industry that went to members of Congress to prevent USDA from implementing this.”