Has this ever happened to you? You want a fresh-from-the-oven, restaurant-quality pizza. But you’re wiped after work and don’t want to leave the comfort of your couch. Well, there was a time when the fine people of eastern Wisconsin had a solution: Call Pizza on Wheels!  The startup would tr ansmit your order to one of its mobile pizza kitchens—trucks equipped with ingredients and ovens—where they’d bake a pizza while en route to your home. That way they’d be able to take the pie straight out of the oven and slice it up just as they pulled up to your driveway. If you follow pizza trends, you might assume Pizza on Wheels was a local knockoff of Zume, the Bay Area startup that developed robotic systems capable of cooking a pizza in a truck on the go. When Zume started delivering pizzas straight from their mobile ovens to consumers’ doors in 2016, they briefly became a media sensation and ultimately raised $445 million from investors.   But Pizza on Wheels was no knockoff. It launched over 50 years before Zume—in 1962. The company emerged not as a modern tech disruption, but instead as part of a wave of mid-20th century Midwestern pizza innovations. Pizza on Wheels’s rise and fall reflects fundamental changes in the way Americans thought about—and consumed—one of our staple foods. (According to the latest government research, on any given day 11 percent of all Americans eat at least one slice.) Yet as fascinating as this chapter in culinary history is, Pizza on Wheels is all but forgotten today.  “I’ve worked in the restaurant business my whole life and been a professional pizza consultant for about 15 years,” Noel Brohner of Slow Rise Pizza, a pizza-making school and business consultancy, told Popular Science. “I feel like I’ve heard it all.” But, he admits, he’d never heard of this.  World War II helped pizza become an American staple Pizza is inherently mobile, says Carol Helotsky, a pizza historian at the University of Denver. As early as the 18th century, pizzaiolos (pizza makers) in Naples, the birthplace of the precursor to the modern American pie, “used to load baked pizzas into insulated boxes and sell it on the streets.”  When pizza came to America alongside a wave of southern Italian immigrants in the late 19th century, it started as a humble home dish, before moving into dedicated pizzerias in Italian neighborhoods. From 1905 through the 1940s, as pizza spread through immigrant communities, deliveries also spread, whether to bars or work crews. But they were ad hoc and hyper local affairs.  Following World War II, American pizza culture changed rapidly. Not only did soldiers return from the Italian theater with a newfound taste for the dish, creating a surge in popular demand. The rapid rise of telephones, the suburbs, and convenience culture collided to create a market for dedicated food delivery as well. In the 1950s, a few pizzerias began running formal delivery services. These services were still far from sophisticated. If you ordered a pie in the 1950s, there was a good chance it’d arrive lukewarm.  Customers wait to grab a 15 cent slice of pizza at a crowded pizzeria in New York. Image: Getty Images / Contributor / Mondadori Portfolio Baking fresh pies on a pizza delivery truck We don’t know exactly when but at some point in the late 1950s, Dennis J. Sheahan of Reedsville, Wisconsin, an entrepreneur who developed radio dispatch systems for buses, apparently had a brainwave: Maybe he could apply his skillset to pizza, specifically for fresher pies.  Sheahan’s vision was simple: He’d buy some vans, equip each of them with water tanks, sinks, counters, a fridge, and a double decker oven—“all the facilities of a modern restaurant,” he wrote in an ad for the service. To publicize his ultra-fresh pizzas, Sheahan also published ads and a phone number in local newspapers.  Customers could call the number, connected to a landline in a pizza HQ (like his home office), and leave their order with a dispatcher. That point of contact would then use a radio to put a call out to all the pizza trucks driving around town, see who was closest and free, and have the driver start motoring over while a chef in the back prepared the pie. They offered 25 topping combos.  Cooking pizzas on the go is a recipe for disaster Helotsky’s not surprised that someone came up with this idea in the 1950s. Demand was spiking through the roof, delivery services were the Wild West of new ideas, and the Midwest was a hub for cutting edge pizza thought. (The modern giants of mass market pizza all got their start in the region: Domino’s and Little Caesar’s in Michigan and Pizza Hut in Kansas.)  But Brohner points out that, even though he can see why someone came up with the idea, it was never really practical.  “Refrigeration on a moving vehicle,” he muses. “What kind of batteries did they have to power anything like that? A gas-powered generator? Maybe, but then you’ve got a tank of gas sloshing around back there. On a busy night, it’s hard enough to keep your ingredients in line and your station clean. In a moving vehicle, I don’t know how much storage space you’d have or how clean you’d be able to run things.” “Oven power would be a limiting factor,” adds Scott Wiener, a massive pizza nerd and founder of Scott’s Pizza Tours, which offers walking and bus tours of prominent pizzerias, mainly—but not exclusively—in New York. “Also, topping and loading a pizza into an oven is fragile already. Adding that movement really puts a lot of pressure on the pizza maker.” “It’d be like Cirque du Soleil, basically,” Brohner confirms.  Even 50 years of technological advancements later, Zume prepared all its dough, sauce, and toppings at a stationary HQ. Then loaded ready-to-cook pizzas into 56 in-van ovens, so all their mobile kitchens would have to do was cook on the go.  Zume Captain Skylar Morris, the “Pielot” of this truck crew, works inside the kitchen preparing pizzas while parked along El Camino Real in Palo Alto, California. Zume Pizza used robotic pizza-makers and smart ovens inside a truck to deliver cooked-to-order pizzas to customers. Image: San Francisco Chronicle/Hearst Newspapers / Contributor / Getty Images / Michael Macor But even Zume, with the aid of modern machines and millions in funding, struggled to keep all the cheese from sliding to one side in the oven. That’s one reason why modern pizza food trucks arrive, park, then bake.  “Convenience is great, I get it,” Wiener stresses. “But you’ll never get a quality pizza with this system.” “The possibility of the pizza actually being good is slim to none,” Brohner agrees. But Pizza on Wheels managed to endure Yet for all these potential pitfalls, local news stories show that Sheahan managed not just to launch one truck in Kenosha in 1962, but also to expand into Madison with three more trucks the next year.  By 1964, he had trucks in Green Bay, and a grand plan to expand into eight more Midwestern cities within the next year. Popular Science was not able to track down any living Pizza on Wheels employees as of publication, so we’re not sure how Sheahan made his van system work.  It’s possible he did tell drivers to park close to a delivery point, do a quick bake job, then drive up and unload the pie. It’s also possible he never solved these problems. A couple of ads from local Wisconsin papers in 1965 suggest that he was offering sweet deals, like free movie tickets, drinks, and donuts, just to get people interested, and offering to finance and staff potential franchisees.  The end of Pizza on Wheels In 1967, ads started appearing in Wisconsin papers selling off Pizza on Wheels trucks. A few of these ads claim that the company needed to liquidate supplies, because a local operator got sick and couldn’t keep up with the business. Whether that’s true, or the idea just wasn’t viable, by the end of 1971 the company faded from history. And it seems that no one copied its model.  None of the pizza experts Popular Science spoke to were surprised by that. Parallel to Pizza on Wheels’ trajectory, the emergence of modern pizza chains like Domino’s slowly reshaped pizza into a cheap commodity and a convenience food—not the sort of thing you expect to get hot out of the oven. (In fact, a sizable portion of the population has learned to love their pizza cold.)  Domino’s in particular popularized and systematized delivery, creating an arms race around speed which culminated in the 30-minutes-or-less guarantees that defined the 1980s. The chain purportedly developed the modern pizza box, as well. These innovations, alongside later ones such as mobile orders and GPS, have gradually improved not just the speed of pizza delivery but also the quality once it reaches consumers—even if it doesn’t arrive piping hot.  “It doesn’t seem like there was enough need” for Pizza on Wheels, Brohner concludes.  That’s probably why Zume never really tried to sell itself on the grounds of freshness. Instead, it focused on developing cook-on-the-go tech writ large—systems it could repurpose, or license out to other companies looking to increase efficiency and cut costs.  (That tech-first focus, a slew of post-mortems later concluded, led Zume to lose focus on actual pizza quality. Which is just one of the reasons the company pivoted to box technology in 2019 and collapsed entirely in 2023.) Helotsky doubts anyone will try to resurrect Pizza on Wheels. But this entrepreneurial blip is a window into a brief, optimistic moment in pizza history when we truly thought that we’d crack the ultimate threshold in freshness technology. Even if ill-fated, it was a beautiful pie in the sky dream.  In That Time When, Popular Science tells the weirdest, surprising, and little-known stories that shaped science, engineering, and innovation. 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