Heart-shaped pizza - reality vs. advertisment

Compare the ad photo of the heart-shaped pizza with the photo of the real thing. It looks like a toothless horse gummed a piece off the pizza.

(UPDATE: Source of photo is Consumerist)

Previously:

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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Spikeles

Whenever i see articles about food not matching the ads, it always makes me think of the Whammy Burger scene from Falling Down.
claatra

Well, the advertisement is for a thin crust and the dude obviously ordered a pan. Their pizza place is probably run like the one I’ve worked at for forever. Let a pushy customer have whatever he wants even if you know that it won’t turn out right. Seriously, they probably prepped a certain amount of thin crusts and when this guy wanted a heart-shaped pizza in thick crust they just went along with it. Never order off the menu. It doesn’t turn out and no one on the other side really cares if it turns out for you anyway.
moop2000

This is what a heart shaped pizza should look like!
monkeythumpa

Looks more like Pacman than a heart.
w000t

I got one a little more than a week ago and must report that it looked exactly as advertised – perfect heart shape.
ill lich

A crescent-shaped pepperoni pizza for Ramadan. . . no wait, that’s not right for at least two reasons.
Anonymous

As a veteran pizza maker I am not surprised by this at all. It would take too long to craft a circular piece of dough into a heart shape and have it retain its form through the cooking process. When I made pizzas for my friends I would take extra time and prepare it with skill and love. Those pizzas looked nothing like the ones the recovering drug addict on house arrest standing next to me made for the regular customers.
alisong76

45: Quite possibly labour, more likely just a means of Giving the Loud Demanding Customer What They Want (ie, MOAR TOPPINGS) while trying to avoid the BAWWWWWWWing that would result if they actually did get all those toppings on top of a half-cooked pizza base.
Anonymous

You have to specify Valentine or anatomical heart. The default anatomical is shown.
bondjamesbond

Dearest friends,

how does that saying go… oh, yes..

“there’s a sucker born every minute..”

yes sir…

but, now we have someplace to complain about our mistakes…
sleestax

we got one from Papa John’s last week (it was the only za place still open, ugghh) and it looked EXACTLY like Pac-Man. No rounding at the top at all, just a 40 degree hunk chopped out. I called and asked them to please bring me two slices of pizza back and they gave me a coupon for a free pie.
jimh

Yeah, it really does just look like less pizza.
Anonymous

I was working for a regional pizza chain in 1991 when we tried this promotion. Let me tell you, making a pizza to look like the one in the ad is a freaking nightmare. It easily takes two to three times the effort/time as a standard circular pie.

Now, combine this with the fact that most stores have some kind of gimicky pricing that makes the heart-pie absurdly cheap, relatively speaking AND that every store employee with a girlfriend takes the day off (or calls off at the last second with “car trouble”) and you’re lucky you were able to even place an order.
jjasper

And to add insult to injury, it’s that crappy Papa John’s pizza (says the NYC Pizza snob).
dimmer

@ #33, so why does every topping cost more then — is that a labor cost or something? Just curious.
Phikus

If they don’t rip you off at freecreditreport or match -.com, it’s with the friggin’ “heart shaped pizza.” What’s the world coming to? *Wanders off grumbling…*
cinemajay

@3, if your heart looks anything like that then you sir, are a marvel of medical science!
Joe MommaSan

No kid who ordered anything from one of those ads in the back of Boy’s Life would be surprised by this one. It doesn’t look like the picture? Imagine that.
Maxon

We got a heart-shaped pizza from Papa Murphy’s, a take and bake pizza place. It looked pretty good. Not quite as good as their advertising, but far better than that… thing. Sorry, didn’t take any pictures of it.
Anonymous

Gosh, I just ordered one to be delivered at my boyfriend’s work!!!! I HOPE it looks like a heart!!!!
cowtown

@ #9,

We had the Papa Murphy’s too. Obviously not as perfect as the one on the coupon, but more or less heart shaped. Definitely within acceptable parameters for fast food (or, technically, in Texas, groceries) advertisement-versus-reality.

The poor girl working alone in the shop assembling heart-shaped pizzas by the dozen had a very melancholy vibe about her, though.
urshrew

Oh… that just makes me sad.
indiecognition

I prefer the good, old-fashioned boob-shaped pizzas anyway.
alisong76

13 and 16:

Actually, it doesn’t and he did.

http://www.sj-r.com/features/x1638575921/Would-you-buy-it
Anonymous

Looks like a Stridex pad.
Teller

It would’ve looked more like a heart had the delivery guy taken a slice for his effort.
Auto Parts for Brains

I actually thought it was normal one with one side chewed on. I would love this pizza for the purpose of eating though. With the heart being fat like that, that means more pizza for me. I hoped they were more true to their ad so people won’t be surprised to get something else when they are expecting a great novel shape.
jfrancis

I’ve always hated the way the weight of pizza toppings is a constant. The more toppings you order, the less of each topping you get.
merreborn

Why would you pay $19.99 for a “heart shaped” pizza in the first place?

Next on BoingBoing: ShamWow isn’t as great as the commercial said it would be!
plainsaman

This photo and story was lifted from the Feb. 13 addition of The Consumerist.
dbarak

Looks like a hip and funky (snark) toilet seat cover.
alisong76

jfrancis at 32, that is because if your pizza has too many toppings, it won’t cook properly.
shashi2005

What about the salami deficit?
Guysmiley

Next on BoingBoing: ShamWow isn’t as great as the commercial said it would be!

Are you saying Vince would lie to me??? SAY IT AIN’T SO!
paboo

Sure doesn’t look like a heart to me. Even if it did look like a heart, I’m sure you still would of had to sleep on the couch if one ordered this for their honey on V-Day. :)
Fiddy

This is such a disappointment. I enjoyed a wonderful evening in a local pizza joint (Pyzano’s) the Thursday before Valentine’s Day, and they were selling some heart shaped pizza pies that were much better crafted than this one.

Best design of all was a perfectly shaped heart pizza made from sweet pastry dough and topped with fresh strawberries and whipped cream. That is the way to a woman’s heart!
Takuan

how about a pizza oven that’s wood fired and has microwave klystrons in the top so you COULD have two inch thick toppings cooked properly without a burnt crust? Has anyone made a hybrid oven?
GTMoogle

I actually ordered one for me and my fiancee at a v-day lan party (waves NERD flag with pride), and it looked significantly better than this, although not as good as the advertising copy, of course. It wasn’t sliced at all thought, which was very lan-inconvenient.

It only comes in thin crust, so presumably they just have a big heart shaped cookie cutter, which makes the failure pictured above something of a mystery.
dbarak

If you held it behind your butt the right way, you might be able to get away with calling it fart-shaped.
Anonymous

Oddly enough, I ordered one of these from Papa John’s for Valentine’s Day. My fiancee and I had already gone to a Cradle of Filth concert the night before (that was her wish, and I managed to score some tickets), so this was just something additional (and cheezy) to do at the last minute.

Our pizza actually looked pretty good. I don’t know if it was just a matter of luck, but I wasn’t disappointed! The sweet treats that came with the pizza made it worth the price of admission, IMHO. Sorry to see others got a crappy pie.
Takuan

how come we never see “Vomit on Cardboard!” as a frozen pizza brand-name?
hohum

We picked up a Papa John’s heart-shaped pizza on VD as well, and it looked great. And I’d have to agree with #37 also that the pastries that came with it were absolutely wonderful.

Generally speaking, I prefer to roll my own, but this was actually a surprisingly nice treat.
Lauren O

I had a heart-shaped pizza at some place in New Hampshire that looked awesome. It came in a box with little heart confettis in it and everything. It was super cute. SUPER cute.
tashikitten

Taste Chicago at 603 N. Hollywood Way., Burbank, CA has a heart-shaped pizza that does, indeed, look like a heart. http://www.tastechicago.biz/
It’s pretty tasty, too. I choose Dino’s Pizza over Taste Chicago, but if I want heart-shaped, I know where to go.
thickdot

In college my buddy forgot about a pizza he had left in the oven, when we got back home it was completely carbonized but hadn’t started a fire. He turned to me and smiled as he had just come up with his final project for sculpture class…he took a nail and nailed it to the wall and called it Art.
Church

Wouldn’t it be easy to make a metal form to contain the pizza through the cooking process? (sorta like how McD’s makes their eggs McMuffin-shaped?) Or would that not work with ‘za?
Rob Cruickshank

Maybe there’s a marked for a “swollen kidney” shaped pizza.
WalterBillington

Well – if buying one of these is how you express love, valentine’s or not, then you deserve what’s shown in the picture.

We reap what we sow.
LogopolisMike

Attention Boing Boing readers in Chicago:

Giordano’s, who also offers a heart shaped pizza on or around Valentine’s Day, does come in a shape of a Valentine’s Day heart. It actually looks more like a V-Day heart than the one advertised above.

Note: This was true about seven or eight years ago when I was a romantic of that kind*.

That kind* = fat.
trr

So the shape is suppposed to make you happy about getting less for your money?