Pizza Hut are sending DAIRY cheese instead of vegan cheese!

 

You might have seen on social media that Pizza Hut are adding Violife as a vegan cheese option in all of their delivery franchises. They have offered it for a long time in their resturants (or for collection from them) but the Delivery chain is a seperate franchise that has been behind until now.

I wanted to try it so we ordered one on their website. As you can see here, there was a loud banner proudly advertising that all of your favourites are now available with Violife vegan cheese!

I selected the violife option and also added all 3 different Beyond Meat vegan toppings to try them out. I added the custom pizza to my basket, paid, and got an email confirming my tasty vegan pizza was on the way!

The tracker reckoned the pizza would be delivered in about an hour, but to our delight it actually arrived only about 20 minutes after we ordered!

I mean, a pizza arrived.

Not the one I ordered, though.

This was so different to what I ordered, I genuinely thought I had someone else's order. My partner's cheeseless pizza had turned up exactly to spec, so it was definitely our order (though there were no labels on the boxes like other delivery chains, I don't know if this is a Pizza Hut specific thing or if it was just our branch).

The pizza was very obviously covered in dairy mozzerella - it smelt like dairy and had browned in a way that I am yet to have seen vegan cheese do. There was one topping which I think was the Beyond Meat sausage - but I wasn't able to try it due to the cheese, and honestly at this point I don't trust that it wasn't real meat. The other two Beyond Meat toppings were nowhere to be seen, despite the fact I was charged for adding 3 toppings. 

I also want to point out at no point were we contacted by Pizza Hut to say there was an issue with the order.

I swallowed my phone anxiety and rung the branch to query the order, and received a response of

"Oh, we don't do vegan cheese at the moment, so we added dairy instead!"

On what planet is this ok?? I can just about understand the website being wrong, if they had rung me after I ordered to explain (I know from others they have done this before when there's been an issue in stocking things such as gluten-free bases, so I'm willing to accept it might have been a branch issue). But they hadn't rung at all, just whacked some dairy on and sent it out anyway. What if the recipient had an allergy? What if it was received by a new vegan who might not know the difference between vegan cheese and dairy cheese?

Thankfully, the person on the phone was very apologetic and helpful, and offered to send out a replacement non-cheese'd pizza. At this point, I asked for a tomato sauce only one as I don't trust them not to contaminate it with some random ingredient if they'd run out of something. 

The replacement pizza took so long to arrive (2 hours after we'd made the original order!), I'd already popped to the supermarket to buy a base and make my own. I was still charged for the extra toppings I never got, at the time of writing this.

I was so excited to try this option and right a nice review for this blog, but unfortunately it's turned into a warning instead. I'd say if you are going to try it, definitely ring your local branch to confirm they have vegan cheese available. They can clearly not be trusted to stick to their word.