How do you get kids to read? Give them pizza

On a recent afternoon, Frank Torok sat inside a pint-size Pizza Hut pop-up, lifted the lid of a miniature pizza box and was overwhelmed by a wave of nostalgia (and a whiff of fresh hot mozzarella).

“I remember getting a little Book It! bookmark and feeling so excited to take that to the Pizza Hut and get that Personal Pan Pizza,” Torok, 37, said, referring to the 6-inch pies that are given to students in preschool through sixth grade who meet their reading goals as part of Pizza Hut’s Book It! reading program. “It was almost like currency.”

Torok is one of more than 70 million people who have participated in the Book It! program, which is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year. Over the years, the program has provided more than 1.5 billion free pizzas to young readers — and counts radio host Charlamagne Tha God, who discovered Judy Blume and Beverly Cleary through it, among its fans.

“When you have millions of kids who refer to the program as a ‘core memory’ of their childhood and school experience, you have created something magical,” Carl Loredo, president of Pizza Hut, said in an email.

Here’s how the program works: In exchange for meeting their monthly reading goals, students are given certificates by their teachers. Readers can then take the documents to a Pizza Hut and leave with Book It! swag, like buttons and bookmarks, and their very own pizza.

Arthur Gunther, then the president of Pizza Hut, started the initiative in October 1984 in response to a call from President Ronald Reagan encouraging America’s businesses to get involved in education. Gunther was particularly inspired by his son, Michael, who had difficulty reading growing up because of eye problems.

Reagan commended the program in a letter in 1985, calling it a “creative initiative.” In 1989, first lady Barbara Bush ordered Pizza Hut pizzas for 200 children for a literacy event she hosted at the White House.

The program stands out among corporate responsibility endeavors for its longevity, said Peter Golder, a professor of marketing at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business who has researched the fast-food industry. The key, he said, is that the program aligns with the Pizza Hut brand’s family values.

Of course, it’s not just the restaurant’s signature decor — the Tiffany-style lamps, the red-checkered tablecloths, the red plastic cups and booths — that former participants are nostalgic about. Just as cherished, many said, are the books they discovered through the program: R.L. Stine’s “Goosebumps” series. Donald J. Sobol’s “Encyclopedia Brown” books. The Berenstain Bears. Amelia Bedelia. The Boxcar Children. The Baby-Sitters Club.

“I don’t think I would’ve read as much without the Book It! program,” Torok said. “It gamified it in a very analog way.”

Robert Ries, 39, who also booked a solo dining experience at the Pizza Hut pop-up in New York City last month, said he read more through the program than he would have otherwise — though he wasn’t in it for the pizza.

“It was really about the competition of collecting the stickers,” he said.

But for other participants, the pizza was the reward. Howie Ray, 40, who is Jewish and does not eat pork, remembers relishing the cheese pizza as a treat he could savor alongside his non-Jewish friends.

“Everyone else wanted pepperoni,” he said, “but I could have my little cheese pizza.”

The program’s swag has also fostered a cult following among adults born in the ’80s and ’90s: The Book It! buttons, which often featured colorful and shiny designs, are popular on eBay. (They were discontinued around the early 2000s. Sorry, Gen Z and Gen Alpha.)

“The holographic ones were the best,” Ries said.

Several buttons, framed in red, adorned the back wall of the 10-by-7.5-foot pop-up in Queens, which also included a red Pizza Hut sign and a checkered tablecloth poster that read: “The best seat in the house is the only seat in the house.”

Over two days, the Pizza Hut pop-up attracted a mix of nostalgic 20- and 30-something Book It! alums, as well as Generation Z influencers who may or may not have participated in the program, which now includes digital certificates, reading logs and options for homeschooled children.

“I can’t believe it still exists,” said Katie Frederick, a 42-year-old mother of two who grew up redeeming Book It! certificates at a Pizza Hut in Lakewood, Colorado, for pepperoni Personal Pan Pizzas with her brother and grandmother.

“I’m really looking forward to my oldest — she’s going to be 5 soon — starting to read,” she said. “It’s so cool that she can be a Book It! kid, too.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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