Fresh off launching its “Flavor of Now” campaign—complete with that adorable commercial of old Italian people judging its pizza—Pizza Hut has a new trick in the making. It wants to help you order your food subconsciously.
Pizza Hut is currently testing the “world’s first subconscious menu” in some of its U.K. locations, according to a report in the Washington Post. The product is a collaboration between Pizza Hut and Swedish eye-tracking firm Tobii Technology, and sounds like a true meeting of fast food and Jedi mind tricks. From the Post:
The digital menu shows diners a canvas of 20 toppings and builds their pizza, from one of 4,896 combinations, based on which toppings they looked at longest. To try again, a diner can glance at a “restart” button.
If the notion of a subconscious menu strikes you as too absurd to be true, you’re not the only one. I reached out to Pizza Hut directly to make sure the whole thing wasn’t some sort of a hoax. A representative for Pizza Hut’s U.K. business confirmed that the subconscious menu is, in fact, real and being tested. You can get a better sense of how the technology works from the Tobii video above. “It’s like magic, but without the weirdness!” the narrator chimes. (That is undoubtedly a matter of opinion.)
A representative for Pizza Hut told the Post that the program will help the “indecisive orderer” and the “prolonged menu peruser” to “cut time and always get it right.” With the subconscious menu, “the focus of dining can be on the most important part—the enjoyment of eating!” the representative added. Or put another way: Don’t think about the food too hard. Just order something!
