Dip Your Pizza Crust

Americans are addicted to it: dipping. And not just nachos in the cheese sauce queso, but also breadsticks and, increasingly, especially pizza crusts in sauces ranging from ranch to blue cheese. Americans aren’t the only ones—dipping is a basic human need.

Food website Eater notes a dipping boom at the four major American pizza chains, including Pizza Hut (founded in 1958) and Papa John’s. A food professor explains this dipping craze as a mix of consumer demand and the hospitality industry’s pursuit of profit. After all, a sauce with every pizza ordered generates a lot of extra revenue.

Dipping boom

But wasn’t the way paved by the popular nachos combined with dips such as queso? After which dipping is now spreading like a sauce stain to anything you can dip into a sauce?

It is, after all, a basic human need to dip your food. Think of the pan of gravy that you wipe clean with a piece of bread, breadsticks or bread in soup, cheese fondue, dipping fries in mayo, pita bread in hummus and chicken wings in sauce.

Pizza Hut registered the slogan ‘Don’t Skip the Dip’

Moreover, it’s a logical step in a food world dominated by comfort food. Food that is usually creamy, soft and (semi-)liquid. Like a sauce. And because you don’t exactly put a bowl of sauce to your mouth very quickly, the nacho, breadstick or pizza crust offers a solution. That’s why Pizza Hut has already registered the slogan ‘Don’t skip the dip’.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BW9icq8lQzG/?tagged=papajohnspizza

Pizza dips

In the Netherlands, New York Pizza sells individual dipping sauces, from barbecue to garlic, but for now these seem to be mainly intended for salads and chicken wings. The dipping sauces from Papa John’s, the pizza chain that established itself in the Netherlands in 2016 and is hugely successful with pizza dips in the US, also still seem to be mainly intended for chicken wings here.

But that could change quickly. One of the dips available to order is already called ‘pizza’.