Pepperoni or anchovies? Mushrooms or black olives? And what about the ever popular and polarizing pineapple? Pizza topping preferences are as varied as the people who order them. While that’s fine for one or two hungry friends, planning multiple pies for a larger group can quickly turn tense. Most of the time, it feels like diners simply settle on one-topping or cheese pizzas in the hopes of avoiding an argument.
From a technical standpoint, it is definitely possible to figure out the optimal pizza toppings based on a group’s various tastes. However, the time it takes to chart out and settle on the most democratically representative dishes may risk devolving into a dreaded “hangry” shouting match. Thankfully, a software engineer has a solution.
The recently launched Pizza Voter website is a free-to-use platform that allows you to email a pizza party invitation to every participant in an upcoming meal. Once accepted, each person then clicks whether they Love, Hate, or Don’t Mind each topping. There’s even a fill-in-the-blank option for the especially picky pizza fan. From there, an internal algorithm weighs each topping’s scores based on the answers, then calculates a perfect pizza that theoretically will satisfy everyone.
According to the creator’s announcement post on Reddit, it takes Pizza Voter about 60 seconds to generate an answer to each topping conundrum. And lest anyone think this is a covert ploy by Big Pizza to amass consumer data: the website includes a full privacy policy explaining that a geographic estimation of every user is the only data it is currently collecting from users.
Tracking location is also not for marketing. Instead, it simply lets everyone know where people are eating the most pizza. Judging from the project’s social media, it’s currently a toss-up between San Francisco and Chicago. We’ll let them argue over the best type of crust.
