Pizza Hut uses Twitter to fight hungerPizza Hut uses Twitter to fight hunger

Ron Ruggless

DALLAS To help raise awareness about worldwide hunger, Pizza Hut turned Monday to its more than 17,500 Twitter followers to help spread the word about where they can donate money.

For each re-tweet (the Twitter version of forwarding) of its message, Pizza Hut pledged four meals to World Hunger Relief, a campaign that supports the United Nations World Food Programme and hunger relief agencies internationally.

Pizza Hut, which tweets as @pizzahut, sent out this message on Monday: “We will donate 4 meals to World Hunger Relief 4 each person who RTs this: http://ow.ly/qWn8 #pizzahut (More: http://ow.ly/r3Cy).” The first link goes to a website where people can donate money to World Hunger Relief.

“Global hunger has reached epic proportions this year -- reaching more than 1 billion hungry people around the world,” said Scott Bergren, president of Pizza Hut. “At Pizza Hut, our goal is to get the word out about what can be done to help feed the hungry. We’re asking our customers to help us spread the word through a simple tweet, and in exchange we will provide meals for World Hunger Relief.”

The donation period started today and will end Oct. 31 at midnight CDT. Pizza Hut said donations will be made for the first 25,000 tweets, providing a total of 100,000 meals.

Pizza Hut’s parent company, Yum! Brands Inc. of Louisville, Ky., has pledged through the Clinton Global Initiative to help provide 200 million meals for school children in developing countries, donate 20 million hours of hunger relief volunteer service in the communities in which it operate, to donate $200 million worth of its prepared food to hunger agencies in the United States, and use the company's marketing to generate awareness of the hunger issue.

Pizza Hut has more than 10,000 in more than 100 nations.

Contact Ron Ruggless at [email protected].