What National Pepperoni Pizza Day is
National Pepperoni Pizza Day is an unofficial US food observance held every September 20. It is not a US federal holiday and does not itself mandate office, school, bank or postal closures. Their actual schedules can depend on other holidays and local arrangements.
In practice, the day functions the way most food observances on this calendar do. Jet's Pizza has run a dedicated National Pepperoni Pizza Day promotional page and has been described in local news coverage as a sponsor of the day, and Domino's and Pizza Hut both run their own September 20 deals independent of that sponsorship. Home cooks and food media use the date as a prompt to post about pizza, a chain-driven marketing pattern similar to what National Taco Day sees every fall, even though that observance's date has since become a weekday rule rather than a fixed calendar date.
The commercial interest tracks pepperoni's standing among pizza toppings generally. A YouGov poll published in May 2023 found pepperoni named as the single favorite topping by 24 percent of Americans, more than any other topping, against 29 percent who named anchovies their least favorite. An older industry estimate, cited by Wikipedia from Convenience Store Decisions, put annual US pepperoni consumption at 251.7 million pounds in 2009, spread across 36 percent of all pizzas produced nationally that year.
Even the registrar admits it does not know where the date came from
Most observances on this calendar trace back to something: a congressional resolution, a presidential proclamation, a named founder, or at least a company that stepped forward and said it started the tradition. National Pepperoni Pizza Day has none of these. National Day Calendar's official page for the day addresses its own history in a single line, without offering even an approximate decade or region to narrow the search:
“National Day Calendar continues researching the source of this delicious food holiday.”
National Day Calendar, official page for Pepperoni Pizza Day
That contrasts with a comparable case on this calendar, National Taco Day. Its 2024 rule change shows Taco Bell and National Day Calendar founder Marlo Anderson jointly stepping forward, on the record, to rewrite the date rule once a trademark dispute over "Taco Tuesday" cleared. No comparable company or individual has made an equivalent move for National Pepperoni Pizza Day, despite chains with a similar commercial interest in the outcome.
Pepperoni is an American invention, and sources disagree on exactly when it began
Despite its name, pepperoni was not created in Italy. Peperone is the Italian word for a bell pepper, and the cured meat Americans call pepperoni has no direct equivalent in traditional Italian charcuterie; it was developed by Italian immigrant butchers working in the United States with American ingredients and techniques.
Precisely when is where sources stop agreeing. Wikipedia's article on pepperoni (checked 12 October 2026) says the 1888 Times of London item was the first printed mention, but marks that claim as dubious; its etymology section dates the first sausage-specific use to 1916 at the latest. Food writer and historian John Mariani, in his book on Italian food's spread through American cuisine, credits Italian immigrants in New York with inventing pepperoni in 1919. A separate account points earlier still, to a 1908 article about sausage purity in The Gateway, a Michigan arts-and-culture magazine, as the first print mention of the word. None of these claims can be fully reconciled against the others from the published record, and all of them predate any evidence that pepperoni was used as a pizza topping specifically.
Two pizzerias, decades apart, are each credited with the first pepperoni pizza
The most-cited claim points to New Haven, Connecticut. Colin Caplan, a pizza historian and author of the book New Haven Apizza, has identified a photographed 1950 menu at a pizzeria called The Spot as the earliest documented evidence of pepperoni used as a pizza topping in the United States. The Spot was later bought by the ownership of Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana, one of New Haven's best-known pizzerias, and Caplan has suggested the topping likely migrated onto pizza from its earlier use as an appetizer plate, the same way many toppings entered American pizza through experimentation rather than a single deliberate invention.
A second, less-verified claim comes from Columbus, Ohio. A short 2015 article in the Columbus Dispatch about Massey's Pizza, a regional chain still operating in the area, included a passing line crediting the company with introducing pepperoni as a topping, alongside a quote attributed to its founder responding to whether he knew what he was doing when he first added it: "Sure I do! Nobody in Chicago, New York or anywhere ever used pepperoni!" The claim has a notable gap, though: Massey's published company history, as posted on its own website, does not repeat or reference it at all, the same kind of thin, unrepeated origin story this calendar has flagged before on National Boyfriend Day, where a hedged suggestion of a 2014 start gets repeated without documentation establishing it as the founding date.
Whichever pizzeria came first, or whether both arrived at the same idea independently, accounts of pepperoni’s spread across American pizza in the following decades emphasize its practical appeal to growing chains. As Pizza Hut and Domino's expanded rapidly through the 1960s and 1970s, both chains adopted pepperoni with cost and distribution advantages often cited in accounts of its popularity. Refrigeration needs depend on the product and whether it has been opened; pepperoni should not be treated as universally safe without refrigeration. Its later widespread use does not establish who first put it on a pizza.
Three pizza-related days, three different dates
Two other pizza days sit on the calendar alongside this one, and a reader searching for "national pizza day" can land on any of the three by mistake. National Cheese Pizza Day, observed roughly two weeks earlier on September 5, covers plain cheese pizza specifically rather than any one topping. National Pizza Day, the broadest of the three and not tied to a topping at all, falls on February 9, well apart from the September pair and nowhere near them. National Day Calendar lists all three, and consistent with the pattern documented above for pepperoni, none of them has ever had a founder or founding organization step forward to claim it.