Some fun facts about Pizza Hut in Hong Kong...

So, Randi and I had pizza and a movie night last Friday night in Hong Kong. In pulling up the delivery number for Hong Kong on the Internet; we found some fascinating facts about Pizza Hut in Hong Kong.

Now, first let me say that Hong Kong has just over 7 million people and covers around 386 square miles (which is close to the equivalent of New York City). However, 75% of the land is open countryside and mountains...that means that more than 7 million people live in an area approximately the same size as Washington D.C. proper, which has a population of around 600,000. On Hong Kong Island alone there are approximately 1,268,112 people which leads to a population density of around 91,500 per square mile. So, I hope you get the fact that Hong Kong is small and loaded with people.

So, now that we know about all the people and how big it is...the next questions comes to mind...how do all those people get their pizza...specifically Pizza Hut pizza?

Well, according to the Hong Kong Pizza Hut website Hong Kong is served by over 4,000 well trained professionals of the Pizza Hut Hong Kong delivery team. Thousands of people dedicated to getting you a pizza, broken down as follows:

1. 500 hotline order operators (covering Mandarin, Cantonese, English, and a few other languages);
2. 1,700 trained prime chefs;
3. over 900 take-out order operators (they drive mopeds and motorcycles with hot boxes on the back); and
4. over 1,000 support staff.

So, if you ever wondered, like me, that there seems to be a ton of Pizza Hut delivery drivers cruising around Hong Kong on their mopeds...yep, there are...there are close to a thousand of them. The coolest thing is that they have over 80 dedicated express centers (this is where the pizza is actually made) to serve the delivery orders. Your pizza is not coming from a restaurant...nope...from a specially designed express center. Pretty cool.

So, mathematically, even if just .1% of the population (7,000 people) order a pizza a night, that means a minimum of 7,000 pizzas are being ordered. That means (assuming 24/7 operations and equal distribution of orders and employees) each operator must take at least 14 calls, each express center must make over 87 pizzas, and every delivery driver must deliver 7 pizzas.

I found this fascinating...just thinking of all the work that goes into our steaming hot pizza making it to our flat.