No, Pizza Chains Are Not Using Glue To Make Cheese Pulls Look Stretchier

From Delish

Earlier this week, a video circulated on Twitter by way of an account called @engineeringvid, along with a bump in retweet form by Mindy Kaling, showing "how a pizza commercial is filmed." In it, pizza is drilled into a serving table so as to stay in place and glue is mixed into mozzarella to make it stretchier, thus achieving a better cheese pull. The video was no doubt intriguing, but it's also likely very outdated.

I went on a (stupid-long) mission to find out whether pizza commercials were actually filmed this way, and, if so, whether that would violate any false advertising laws, as commenters to the tweet suggested. Now, if the glue was mixed in with cheese to make it stretchy and then served to customers (no one is suggesting this, I know), that would be a safety issue and thus up to the FDA to regulate. However, since it's a matter of advertising, it falls on the Federal Trade Commission.

Per the FTC, there is no specific rule saying advertisers can't add inedible products to foods while making commercials. However, if doing so misleads the consumer about an important characteristic of the food, there could be a problem. In the 1960s, the FTC sued Campbell's Soup for adding marbles to a soup bowl in an ad, making the soup seem chunkier than it really was. For a company closely associated with the word chunky (their slogan was once "So chunky you could eat it with a fork."), adding marbles to make it appear chunkier misrepresented the product.

And while the translation to pizza is a bit murky—"stretchiest cheese ever!" is not a claim most pizza shops are making—producing an impossibly long pull by way of glue is a pretty direct route toward misrepresenting a product. Cheese, obviously, is a pretty important characteristic when it comes to pizza.

So what are stylists doing to get those sexy cheese pulls? They wouldn't quite say, but a few brands did confirm glue is not involved. When I asked Papa John's what their practice was in commercials, a representative said "the pizzas Papa John’s uses on set are 100% edible." Pizza Hut's chief brand officer, Marianne Radley, said this:

Luckily, we happen to handle a lot of cheese pulls here at Delish, and Assistant Food Editor Lena Abraham spilled the tea on the test kitchen's process: "We usually cut, add cheese (Polly-O Low Moisture Mozz is THE KEY), and then we use a heat gun to melt it."

TL;DR? Yes, there's certainly some movie magic involved in styling food to make it look its best on set. Glue, however, is almost certainly not part of the equation.

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