There was a time when that pizza would arrive at your home 20 to 30 minutes later as cold and unappealing as your very own life. But all that changed when one woman who had never worked in the food industry had had enough with this cold pizza bullshit and did something about it.
The Inventor:
In the early 1980s, Ingrid Kosar was working for a manufacturer of steel-based products when she found inspiration in an insulated lunch bag she spotted at a craft fair. She was really into pizza at the time -- which is to say she was a fully functioning human with no catastrophic mental damage -- so she tried making a bag that could keep a pizza hot until it was delivered.
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Back then, Domino's pizza had developed the standard for pizza boxes. Their pizzas were around 180 to 200 degrees out of the oven, and they aimed to maintain a post-baking temperature of 140 degrees for 45 minutes. Kosar needed to beat that. Domino's boxes were designed to vent steam and prevent a soggy crust, but at the cost of losing delicious heat. Ingrid's first bags retained heat by trapping it behind layers of polyester and nylon. This kept the pizza warm, and the vents on the pizza box kept it crispy. Even more impressive, pizzas in the bag would lose only around 5 degrees an hour. A delivery guy could leave the pizzeria, play Pac-Man, and flirt with some mallrats for 20 minutes and still deliver a piping-hot pizza.
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