Longest Pizza

Sunday, August 29, 2010, Krakow, Poland, witnessed the culmination of one of the world’s most ambitious superlative food records of all time.

MAKRO™ cash & carry, one of the largest of its type in the world, in association with local restaurant MAGILLO set out to break the GUINNESS WORLD RECORDS™ record for ‘the longest pizza’ in the world, a record (perhaps unsurprisingly) to date held by an Italian pizzeria, at just over a very impressive 407 metres.

Polish ambitions were such that a specialist team of over 200 chefs hoped to obliterate the existing record by creating a pizza that would stretch over a distance of 1km (yes, you heard right, that’s 1,000 metres), more than twice the existing Italian record.

To achieve the new record, Guinness World Records stipulated that the pizza would have to form one continuous piece with a minimum of two different toppings. Following the seemingly endless task of making the dough from 3.5 tons of flour, hundreds of pallet-sized sections were transported to a specially constructed 1km plus long table where an army of volunteers painstakingly needed the individual dough’s together and lovingly garnished the base with a layered topping of herbed-sauce, mozzarella, sweet corn and mushrooms.

Once the topping was in place, a four-oven mobile ‘train-set’ was specially constructed to travel slowly over the pizza to ensure that it was thoroughly cooked-through.

Starting with preparations at 2 am, this record attempt was an achievement which required unrivalled levels of planning, patience, team collaboration, determination and execution; demonstrating skills akin to a finely tuned military operation.

After an exhausting and latterly, tense, 18 hours of pizza activity, it gave me great pleasure to announce the new Guinness World Records achievement had been set at a mouth-watering 1, 010 metres and 28 cm, a truly remarkable effort by all concerned. Equally as pleased with the new record were thousands of hungry locals who couldn’t wait to get stuck into one legendary pizza.

GUINNESS WORLD RECORDS will always be drawn towards extraordinary feats of human accomplishment, and in any language a one kilometre pizza is a truly astonishing achievement, one that is unlikely to be beaten for quite some time.

 Congratulations to all in Krakow who made GWR feel so welcome in this truly beautiful city.

By Raymond Marshall