Pizza is America’s favorite food. So it’s no surprise that we see so many products that aren’t pizza, wanting to be pizza. They know that they are not pizza, but if they could just taste like pizza…

USA Today recently covered some of the more unusual products to boast pizza flavoring, including Doc Popcorn gluten-free pizza popcorn; a pizza marinara nutrition bar from Journey; Eda’s sugar-free pizza-flavored hard candy; pizza ice cream from Little Baby’s Ice Cream; and Mama Mia! Pizza Beer.

I love to see pizza-flavored items in stores; sometimes I even snap pictures of the fun packaging (see photo above). I believe that pizza-flavored products serve a very important purpose–they inspire the ordering of real pizzas.

The fact is, these products will not cure a pizza craving. In fact, they’ve been known to cause pizza cravings! They do taste reminiscent of pizza (usually a hint of marinara or spicy oregano flavor). However, once consumers see them or taste them, they usually want the real thing, which is a big bonus for you.

Here are some other pizza-flavored snacks I’ve seen over the years. Have you tried them? Which ones am I leaving out?

Combos Pizzeria Pretzels
Brim’s Pizza Balls
T.G.I. Fridays Pizza Chips
Doritos Pizza Cravers and Pizza Supreme
Pirate’s Booty New York Pizza
Pringles Pizza chips and Stix
Herr’s Pizza Flavored chips
Knorr Pizza Noodles
Pepperidge Farm Extreme Pizza Goldfish
Tribe Pizza Hummus
Lay’s Stax Pizza
Canine Carry Outs pizza flavor (dog snacks)
Go Raw Organic Pizza Flax Snax
Annie’s Pizza Snack Mix

How can you use these in your marketing efforts? Try the following:

• Ask customers to bring in a new or empty container of their favorite pizza-flavored snack for a free appetizer.
• Run a social media contest to name as many pizza-flavored snacks as possible.
• Have an in-store blind taste-test contest to match up the pizza-flavored snack to its package.
• Run a Facebook contest where the first person to post a pic of a pizza-flavored snack wins a free pizza.
• Ask customers what kind of snack they would create if asked to make something with pizza flavoring.