Meet The Man Who's Using Pizza To Make The World A Better Place

Slice Out Hunger founder Scott Wiener ponders how we can fight food insecurity starting with pizza as a common ground.

Is it possible for pizza to make the world a better place? Slice Out Hunger founder Scott Wiener thinks so. In 2008, riding on his self-described obsession with pizza and pizza box artwork — he holds the Guinness World Record for owning 1,600 pizza boxes and wrote a book about it — Wiener started Scott’s Pizza Tours in New York City. In 2015, he officially created the charity offshoot, Slice Out Hunger, as a nonprofit despite not having much experience in the nonprofit sector. The organization partners with pizzerias and charities, both locally and nationally, to raise money for campaigns like Pizza vs. Pandemic, Toppings for Texas, Vax and Snacks, and the annual Pizza Across America, which distributes pizzas to soup kitchens and shelters on National Pizza Day (Feb. 9). So far, SOH has raised more than $1 million to fund hunger relief efforts. In this edition of Voices in Food, Wiener talks to Garin Pirnia about the challenges of running a nonprofit and how pizza might just save humanity.

Slice Out Hunger started off as an annual fundraising event every year since I started Scott’s Pizza Tours. Pizzerias I work with offered to give me a few free pizzas to throw a little party and have a good time. I started using those parties as ways to charge my friends, basically, a dollar per slice. Scott’s Pizza Tours would match those funds and send all the money as a donation to a local hunger relief charity. After a few years, Slice Out Hunger became the name of the overall organization when we became a 501(c)(3). We started doing other things that were not just that one event.