Who created National Pizza Month?

Pizza Today, a pizzeria trade magazine, credits its founder Gerry Durnell and dates the creation to 1984, and no account independent of the magazine has been found. The reason it gives, that October marked the debut of the magazine's first issue, does not match the magazine's Library of Congress record, which says it began publishing in 1983.

Is National Pizza Month the same as National Pizza Week?

No. National Pizza Week is a separate observance, and the contemporaneous newspaper record puts it in January rather than October.

Are there other pizza dates inside October?

Two, and the same trade magazine keeps both: a day for sausage pizza on the eleventh, and World Pizza Makers Day on the twenty-fifth.

National Pizza Month

Next celebratedThursday, October 1, 2026

National Pizza Month runs the length of October, which leaves room for more than one pizzeria. Walk into a shop you have never used, try the style you usually skip, and go back before the month is out for the one that worked.

See how to celebrate

Countdown to the day

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Last updated September 7, 2026 · by the Holiday Calendar TeamHave an update or spot an error?

YEARLY DATEAll of October

OBSERVED INUnited States

CATEGORYFood

SUBCATEGORYPizza

ORIGIN

Media Origin

FOUNDING ENTITY

Gerry Durnell, Pizza Today

FIRST OBSERVED

~1984

“The magazine's own serials record at the Library of Congress reads: Began in 1983.

HOW THE HOLIDAY CAME TO BE

A trade magazine handed its own industry a month.

Pizza Today, the pizzeria trade magazine Gerry Durnell started in Santa Claus, Indiana, says its founder created National Pizza Month in 1984 to mark the debut of the magazine's first issue. The magazine's serials record at the Library of Congress says it began publishing a year earlier than that, and the earliest trace of the month outside the magazine is October 1987.

See Pizza Today's operator tool kitvia pizzatoday.com

INTRO

October is pizza's month because a publisher in Indiana said so

National Pizza Month tells one story about itself, and it is a tidy one. A pizzeria trade magazine created it in 1984, the story goes, to mark the month the magazine's first issue appeared.

The magazine's own record at the Library of Congress says it began in 1983. Cataloguers described the title from its second volume, first issue, dated January 1984, which leaves the first volume in the year before. Library copies of the bound run keep one volume to a year all the way to 2010, and every one of them puts the first volume in 1983.

So October was not the month the magazine arrived. What October became instead is the one stretch of the year when a pizza trade magazine offers any pizzeria in the country a logo, a calendar and a reason to put something in the window.

GOOD TO KNOW

Surprising facts about National Pizza Month

A California pizzeria was running a pizza week in October in 1960

Twenty-four years before the month is dated to, the Gay 90's Pizza Parlor took display advertising in Santa Rosa's Press Democrat on 12 and 13 October 1960 reading FREE PIZZA! FREE PIZZA! National Pizza Week. It is two advertisements from one parlour, not a national campaign, and it is a week rather than a month.

Every one of 2025's biggest pizza days landed on a Friday

Slice, an ordering platform for independent pizzerias, ranked the 25 highest-volume ordering days across its network in 2025. All 25 were Fridays, which is a fact about the week rather than the month.

Nobody agrees how many pizzerias America has

Pizza Today's own 2025 trends report cites IBISWorld for more than 74,000 pizzeria businesses and Statista for 80,175 pizza restaurants, on the same page, without reconciling them.

The magazine lost a year of its own numbering

Its cataloguers logged the slip in the record itself: the 2019 issues went out marked volume 38, where a run beginning in 1983 makes them volume 37. The latest issue the Library of Congress recorded, in March 2024, was volume 42, exactly where that run puts it.

The single largest order on the busiest pizza day of 2025 came to $2,991

Slice's own tally of 31 October, the heaviest ordering day of the year across its network, records one order at $2,991. The day's order volume ran 137.7 percent above the same date a year earlier.

ORIGINS

Pizza Month history

INTRODUCTION

Gerald L. Durnell had been a rock and roll disc jockey, a television cameraman and an announcer on the Ozark Jubilee. He was later a captain in the U.S. Army who flew more than 180 reconnaissance missions before a surface-to-air missile hit his plane, and then a member of the Missouri House of Representatives for three terms. Then he moved to Santa Claus, Indiana, took a job as creative director at a press there, and went into the pizza business.

By his magazine's account he went looking for a periodical or a trade show that could tell him how to run the place, and found neither. So he built both.

CHAPTER 01

A magazine, a show and a month

Pizza Today went out monthly from P.O. Box 114 in Santa Claus, at eighteen dollars a year, published by a company called Pro Tech Publishing and Communications. It became the official publication of the National Association of Pizza Operators, and Durnell founded the International Pizza Expo with the magazine and the association behind it.

National Pizza Month is the third thing the magazine credits him with. It says he created it in 1984 to mark the debut of the first issue. No account of that has been found outside Pizza Today itself, and the debut it names sits a year later than the magazine's own cataloguing record.

CHAPTER 02

Where October actually turns up

The earliest trace found outside the magazine is October 1987. On the twenty-first, a Santa Cruz Sentinel column listed a run of the month's other claimants: National Apple Month, National Seafood Month, National Pasta Month, National Pizza Month and National Popcorn Poppin' Month, noting that the apostrophe belonged to the Popcorn Institute. The next day a paper called the Express ran its own version of the list, with National School Lunch Week in it too.

The 1988 edition of Chase's Calendar was the first to list it, and that same October an Associated Press story told readers October had been named National Pizza Month. A year later a North County Times column reported that Governor George Deukmejian had proclaimed October pizza month in California as well.

TIMELINE

Timeline

A trade magazine starts in a tiny Indiana town

Pizza Today began publishing monthly from a post office box in Santa Claus, Indiana, at eighteen dollars a year.

The year the magazine claims

Pizza Today dates the creation of National Pizza Month to this year and credits its founder, Gerry Durnell.

The name reaches the newspapers

A Santa Cruz Sentinel column listed National Pizza Month among the food months competing for October.

Chase's Calendar catches up

Chase's Calendar carried the month for the first time, and an Associated Press story put the name in front of newspaper readers.

A governor joins in

A North County Times column reported that George Deukmejian had proclaimed October pizza month in California too.

The month changes hands

Emerald Expositions bought Pizza Today and the International Pizza Expo from Macfadden Communications Group.

BY THE NUMBERS

National Pizza Month by the Numbers

5 of 25: 2025's biggest pizza ordering days that fell in October, on the Slice network
31: Days of ready-made social posts in Pizza Today's October operator calendar
$42.11: Average order on 31 October 2025, the Slice network's busiest pizza day of the year
$50.1 billion: US pizza restaurant revenue projected for 2024 by IBISWorld

WHY THIS DAY MATTERS

Why We Love National Pizza Month

TRADE

A logo, a graphics pack and thirty-one days of posts, free to any pizzeria that wants them.

Pizza Today still runs the month it says it invented, and it runs it as a kit. Operators can download the official National Pizza Month logo, a pack of social graphics, press-release material and a customisable social calendar covering every day in October, then push it all out under the hashtag nationalpizzamonth. The magazine's own suggestions include crowning a customer the Ultimate Pizza Fan and opening the month with a press event for local food writers.

OWNERSHIP

It travelled a long way from a post office box

Durnell and his wife eventually sold the company on, and in March 2015 Emerald Expositions bought both Pizza Today and the International Pizza Expo from Macfadden Communications Group. Emerald called the Expo the largest tradeshow for pizza professionals in the world and put it inside the top 200 largest tradeshows in the United States. The magazine's publisher of record today is Emerald X, LLC of New York.

DEMAND

October is genuinely the pizza trade's month, for other reasons

On Slice's network of independent pizzerias, Halloween was the single biggest ordering day of 2025, at 190,340 orders. Slice explains the month by football, cooler weather and Halloween, and its own October advice to pizzerias opens by saying it is no wonder October is National Pizza Month. The season is the reason it gives, not the promotion.

Surely, there must be a periodical or tradeshow that can give me the type of advice I need to be successful.

Gerry DurnellFounder of Pizza Today, in his magazine's retelling

Halloween is consistently one of the year's busiest nights for pizzerias.

SliceOrdering platform for independent pizzerias

MYTH VS FACT

Common Misconceptions

The myth

The U.S. Congress officially designated October as National Pizza Month in 1987.

The truth

The United States Statutes at Large carries nothing under the name, and neither do the 1987 Congressional Record's debates, its Daily Digest, its subject index or its History of Bills. The claim appears on the originating magazine's own pages and on Wikipedia, where editors have flagged it as needing a primary source.

The myth

National Pizza Month and National Pizza Week are the same thing.

The truth

They sit months apart. Californian newspapers put National Pizza Week in January in thirty of the thirty-one mentions found between 1980 and 2000, the earliest on 14 January 1986.

GET INVOLVED

How to Celebrate National Pizza Month

Take the kit if you run a pizzeria

The magazine behind the month gives its assets away. Download the logo, the social graphics and the October calendar, in a spreadsheet or a PDF, and put your own offers in the empty days.

CROWN

Crown somebody the Ultimate Pizza Fan

One of Pizza Today's own low-cost ideas is to invite customers to make the case, on social media, for why they should win. It costs a pizza and it produces a month of other people's posts about your shop.

FEED

Feed the local press on the first

Another of the magazine's suggestions is to open October with an event for local reporters, food writers and bloggers, and to give them something to watch rather than a menu to read. A dough-tossing demonstration or a class works better than a press release.

HANG

Hang the month on its two fixed dates

A month is a long promotion to sustain, and the same trade calendar drops two anchors inside it: one for sausage on the eleventh, one for the people who make the pizza on the twenty-fifth. Build the middle of October around them.

ORDER

Order from a shop with nine or fewer of them

Pizza Today counts a pizzeria as independent when it has nine units or fewer and no franchise or licence agreement, and its 2025 trends report puts the independent share of the American market at somewhere between 40 and 60 percent.

Test your knowledge

How well do you know National Pizza Month?

1 / 8

What does the Library of Congress record say about when Pizza Today began publishing?

Answer

It is not a public holiday, and no designation of it appears in the United States Statutes at Large, in the 1987 Congressional Record, or in the Federal Register. The one official act located is a state one, reported by a California newspaper in October 1989: Governor George Deukmejian had proclaimed October pizza month in the state.

COLOPHON

Sources

How we know what’s on this page. References, not endorsements.

17sources

15primary records

9independently dated

Primary records

Library of Congress

Pizza today. Record details, LCCN sn 84001569

The national serials record for the magazine, giving its run as 1983 onward, its issuing body as the National Association of Pizza Operators, and the latest issue consulted as volume 42, number 3, March 2024.