Hey, did you know that Cinnabon once tried to add pizza to its menu – or at least,
it tried to sell its own take on the classic pizza? It's true… and for a hot second back there,
it looked like the chain might actually pull it off. The brand's so-called 'Pizzabons"
were rolled out in 2012 and given a test run at the Cumberland Mall in Atlanta,
Georgia. One thing's for sure: The move earned Cinnabon quite a bit of press,
even though the coverage wasn't exactly fawning. Heck, even the editors at Time magazine wrote
a story about this full-throttle fast-food experiment, endearingly headlining its article:
"Thinking Outside the Bon"
At the time, Cinnabon spokesperson Rachel Hadley was clearly over the moon about these Pizzabons,
going so far as to tell the Huffington Post that they happened to be her favorite product
being tested that year. And when asked whether the
Pizzabon was destined to go national, she coyly replied,
"We're hoping."
Well, sadly for Hadley and all the rest of us, Cinnabon's Pizzabons were in fact
destined to fail in a very big way... much like other fast-food fiascos like Burger
King's notorious bacon sundae and Taco Bell's sad seafood salad. In fact, there's precious little
evidence online that Pizzabons ever existed in the first place. Mind you, there is this one official
promotional photo left over from the effort, which you can see right here. And a quick scroll through
Instagram confirms that quite a few kitchen crusaders have tried making their own versions
of Pizzabons over the years, albeit with varying degrees of success. More power to them, we say.
Of course, this all raises the question: why wasn't Cinnabon's Pizzabon destined to be a
success after all was said and done? The concept was really pretty straightforward
when you stop to think about it. The recipe kept Cinnabon's signature dough,
but traded in all the cinnamon, sugar, and frosting for tomato sauce,
cheese, and plump pieces of pepperoni. What could possibly go wrong, right?
Well, as any Chicagoan or New Yorker will undoubtedly tell you, pizza needs to be made using
a decent tomato sauce and decent cheese if it's going to be any good. And judging by the reviews,
Cinnabon's Pizzabon was… not that. In fact, it wasn't really even pizza… at least,
it wasn't pizza the way we all expect pizza to be. Instead, it was more like a
strange hybrid product – the freakish love child of a pizza pie and a cinnamon roll.
Sort of. Here's how Cinnabon president Kat Cole described this culinary curiosity back in 2014:
"People may remember we have even launched a Pizzabon at one point, which
is literally, like, a pizza roll with no cinnamon, no frosting."
Confused? You're not alone. In fact,
it sounds like the Pizzabon left quite a few customers scratching their heads.
As one befuddled Twitter denizen wrote on the official Cinnabon account page:
"Why do we need more foods that taste like pizza? Is it that hard to get pizza?"
Of course, it's not even remotely hard to get your hands on a piece of pizza…
and perhaps that's one of the many reasons that Cinnabon's Pizzabons fell short and no longer
exist on this Earthly plane. In a decidedly lukewarm review, Serious Eats wrote that
"For me, the real problem with the Pizzabon is [...] I'd never get a Pizzabon AND a Cinnabon
together (just typing that made me bloated and sleepy)... and I certainly wouldn't do the
walk of shame up to a Cinnabon without getting the syrupy-sweet version (because I'm a weak,
weak man)... so I'm not sure when or why I would seek out a Pizzabon again."
Fair enough, right? Meanwhile, Kotaku's review was similarly so-so, with writer Mike Fahey claiming:
"It's pretty tasty [but…] the Pizzabon is not for everyone. My [wife] still considers it a
horrible abomination, a bastardization of pizza that skimps on the sauce
and cheese and whose limp pepperoni fails to satisfy in any sense of the word."
From what we can tell, Cinnabon's ill-fated Pizzabons never quite made it out of the testing
stage, and perhaps that's for the best… for all of us. As Cole told CNBC in 2014,
"It was not successful in the bakeries but we learned a lot from it… and that
was really more valuable than the product's success on its own."
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