Pizza Hut made the first online food order in 1994, selling a pizza to a customer in California.
The order was placed through an early online system and is widely recognized as the first purchase of food over the internet. It involved a pepperoni pizza from a Pizza Hut restaurant in Santa Cruz, California.
The event happened before online ordering became a routine feature of restaurant websites and smartphone applications. At the time, internet commerce was still experimental, and the transaction demonstrated that a familiar consumer service could be adapted to a new digital medium.
Pizza Hut later became a major participant in online and mobile ordering, but the 1994 transaction should not be confused with the launch of its modern app or website ordering systems. Those technologies developed much later.