Grabbing a bite to eat while rushing to catch a plane isn't much fun. Nor is taking food out of a wrapper and spilling crumbs on one's clothes. Pizza Hut Express restaurants wanted to help its customers prevent these mishaps, so the Dallas, TX-based company turned to the Wrappie® by Wrapco Packaging Technology (Miami Lakes, FL).
The company started testing the Wrappie for its breakfast sandwiches in November '98 and launched it nationally last May in more than 300 Pizza Hut Express locations that serve breakfast. The Wrappie packaging system uses pleats so a sandwich can be unwrapped a little bit at a time. By exposing just a small portion of the sandwich, the Wrappie contains the majority of the sandwich, thus reducing crumbs while also retaining heat.
That's just what Pizza Hut Express was looking for, says Tom Tucker, manager of national training for the restaurants. "We use a Parmesan cheese-coated bun [for our breakfast sandwiches] that produces a lot of crumbs," he says. "We were searching for something that we could put our logo on, which would hold the warmth and travel a little better than the traditional flat paper wrapper."
Pizza Hut Express restaurants are located in airports, hotels, bowling alleys and stadiums. They serve a wider variety of foods than Pizza Hut restaurants, including breakfast sandwiches of egg and meat or just egg on a bun made of dough similar to pizza dough.
Not only does the Wrappie offer benefits to Pizza Hut Express customers, it meets the needs of company employees, as well. "We were concerned about employees being able to properly wrap the product," Tucker says. That hasn't been a problem with the Wrappie. "It only takes minutes to show someone how to wrap a sandwich in it," says Tucker. He adds that the procedures used to wrap the sandwiches with traditional flat paper wrap were more difficult to teach people.
