In 1962 Wisconsin, delivery pizzas were cooked in traffic

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 transmit 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 (pi