China is so crazy about durian that it’s now Pizza Hut’s best-selling pizza ingredient in the country

• Durian pizza is now Pizza Hut’s hottest pie in China, with Yum reporting 30 million sold this year.
• Yum China’s CEO, Joey Wat, said on Monday the dish is now Pizza Hut’s “No. 1 best-selling pizza.”
• Chinese demand for durian has exploded in recent years, with 1.4 million tons imported last year.

China’s durian obsession has run so high that it’s now taken pizza sales by storm.

Yum China, which runs Pizza Hut in the country, said in its quarterly earnings call on Monday that durian pizza has become its top pie nationwide.

“One in every four pizzas sold in Pizza Hut China is now a durian pizza. We sold nearly 30 million durian pizzas year-to-date,” said Joey Wat, Yum China’s CEO, in a call with analysts.

The dish is “now our No. 1 best-selling pizza,” she added.

China has, in recent years, been a raging consumer of durian, known in Asia as the king of fruit. Protected by a thorny, hard husk, each contains several yellow or orange globules of custard-like pulp wrapped around a seed.

Durian lovers praise the fruit for its bittersweet taste, but it’s notorious outside Asia for what some say is a putrid odor.

China is by far the world’s biggest importer of durian, bringing in 1.4 million tons of the fruit in 2023 alone. That year, HSBC analysts said the country was largely responsible for a 400% surge in durian demand worldwide.

Grown typically in Southeast Asia on trees that take nearly a decade to mature, it’s seen as a luxury item in Chinese cities, which regularly hold entire festivals dedicated to tasting the fruit.

Yum China launched its durian pizza eight years ago. In its 2023 annual report, it said that the dish has officially brought in at least $100 million in sales since then.

In August, a beef burger made with pizza dough that was stuffed with durian and pineapple also debuted on the Pizza Hut menu in China, and Wat said on Monday that the item “quickly sold out” after its limited launch.

The firm has been aggressively trying to expand its reach to middle-class consumers in the country, building nearly 1,700 new KFC and Pizza Hut stores in 2023 and between 1,500 and 1,700 more planned for 2024.

Yum said it plans to spend between $700 and $850 million on capex this year, up from $710 million last year and $419 million before the pandemic.

Meanwhile, Chinese state media reported that the country imported about $6.72 billion worth of durian in 2023, making it the most-imported fruit in the country.