Pizza Hut debuts iPhone ordering appPizza Hut debuts iPhone ordering app

Ron Ruggless

DALLAS Pizza Hut on Wednesday unveiled a free application for iPhone and iTouch users that allows customers to place food orders and download coupons.

With the application, available from Apple's iTunes App Store, users can find nearby Pizza Huts through the phone’s location functions and scroll, tap, pinch, stretch, drag, drop, tilt and shake their orders. (See a demonstration at www.pizzahut.com/iPhone.) Customers can also pull “coupons” off a “virtual refrigerator” that touts current deals.

Penetration among the 40 million iPhones users is especially high among men 18 to 34 years old, which Pizza Hut says is a target demographic. Users in that group are more often likely to make purchases using mobile platforms as well, said Brian Niccol, chief marketing officer for Dallas-based Pizza Hut.

“As more of our customers are integrating the iPhone and iPod touch into their everyday lives, Pizza Hut wants to be right there with them,” he said.

The pizza ordering section allows registered consumers to build their own pizza by choosing a type of crust in the scroll wheel, “pinching” or “stretching” the pie to select size, and dragging and dropping toppings onto the pizza. If a customer orders too many toppings, the pizza explodes and alerts the person making the order to use fewer toppings.

Wings are ordered in a “bowl” that is shaken, and a virtual “waiter” takes the pasta orders. The app doesn’t yet allow for add-ons such as drinks.

The app also offers a “Pizza Hut Racer” obstacle game to entertain even those not waiting for a pizza to be delivered.

The new ordering application comes a day after Pizza Hut's parent company, Louisville, Ky.-based Yum! Brands Inc., reported second quarter results, that included an 8-percent drop in same-store sales at the pizza chain.

Pizza Hut, which has more than 10,000 restaurants worldwide, has offered mobile-phone ordering since January 2008, and the company launched a Facebook ordering platform earlier this year.

Contact Ron Ruggless at [email protected].