The Rich Semiotic History of the Pizza Box (Pt. 1)
From practical packaging to pop-art phenomena
At a glance, the pizza box appears unremarkable: a four-sided cardboard construction that maintains your pie's structural integrity and optimal temperature during the rigors of transport.
The mechanics of the pizza box deal in steam management: ideally, the container keeps your 'za toasty while still venting enough moisture to keep your crust crusty.
Admittedly, this poses a largely Sisyphean task which any box fashioned by flawed human hands in a cold, uncaring universe will to some extent, fail.
Setting thermodynamics aside for the moment, however, we've long suspected there's greater depth to the pizza box than its plain appearance suggests and that those corrugated ridges hide untold wonders and imponderable philosophical quandaries.
A little research has confirmed that hunch; the pizza box is much more than a humble container. The broad flat panels that constitute your box lend it a Chimeric fluidity, shielding your pie from the world while providing a blank surface with infinite potential for art and design.
This deceptive box is a feat of engineering and a triumph of artistry, a capsule for both calories and creation.
How so? Well, the graphic that enwraps all pizza boxes must pull double-duty, transmitting essential information to a viewer while also aesthetically enchanting them. An accomplished pizza box is nourishing twice over: first for the contents it harbors within, second for the resplendency it bears without.
When one considers that over a billion pizzas are delivered each year, each ensconced in its own container, the pizza box represents some of the most globally consumed (heh heh heh) mediums of art ever conceived.
Pizza Box Design Through Time
The modern pizza box with its corrugated cardboard construction was invented by Tom Monaghan, founder of Domino's Pizza, in close collaboration with Triad, a Detroit-based paper products company. As such, the first pizza boxes had the ignominious distinction of bearing corporate logos.
Of course, many modern boxes still bear the indignity of anodyne corporate design. But the steady growth of smaller, independent pizza joints in the intervening decades has generated a remarkable diversity of box decor.
Along the way, the pizza box has developed a unique visual language with a complex and evolving visual grammar that combines aesthetic considerations with practical realities.
When one examines pizza boxes en masse, specific themes emerge:
Allusions to New York City: no matter how geographically removed the joint may be, as if any association with the Big Apple, regardless of how tenuous (or outright fabricated), bestows a certain greasy shine on the product.
Declaring the utter, unmitigated supremacy of the shop: "You've tried the rest, now try the best," or "Best Slice in XXX (insert location)" are typical statements. An effective pizza box exudes unshakeable confidence.
Pizza Box Guy: Depictions of white-frocked, ivory-hatted, mustachioed Italian chefs, often expertly tossing a disc of pizza dough in the air.
Practical Considerations of Pizza Box Design
As the true artist knows, restraints do not imprison the creative mind; they are, in fact, the hammer that breaks the shackles and sets it aloft. This is true of the pizza box, which imposes immutable requirements on the pizza box designer.
Early on, technology limited box artists to a handful of colors and simple imagery. Cardboard accepts a reduced rainbow of inks: primarily red, green, and black. Such limitations inspired bold, minimalist graphical designs in mono- and duo-tones.
The iconic checkerboard pattern, combining graphical punch with a one-two colorscheme (often in Italian-inspired red and green), plus an association with the kitchen environment, lent itself naturally to this design ethos and cemented its status as an iconic pizza-box pattern.
While more adventurous shades have always been available, they came at considerable extra cost. Thus two-tone boxes were the most cost effective, and so the most common choice for boxes produced at significant scale.
However, that did mean that swirling in a third shade (or, for the truly flush, a fourth), should your budget allow, ensured your box would stand out from the stack.
Similarly, cardboard would not allow for the elaborate line work of a Renaissance master. Only simple, line drawings (think early Clip Art) would effectively print on a box. Thus the pioneering creative, bound on all sides much like a pizza itself, could deploy only basic lines, using subtle gesture and shape to suggest entire (pizza-based) worlds.
As printing and material technologies have progressed, the options available to the pizza box designer have multiplied. A much richer palette is now available, and far finer detail made possible by modern printing techniques.
Today we routinely see boxes of such staggering complexity and nuance that they would leave early box designers stunned and speechless.
In part 2, we take a critical look at contemporary pizza box design, and reveal the secret formula for the perfect pizza parcel.
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Grady Mitchell is a writer, a photographer, and the developer of the S.L.I.C.E. system, a scientific framework for evaluating what makes a good pizza box …good.