The Greek Inventor of Hawaiian Pizza

Some love it and others hate it. But very few people know that the man who made the brave decision back in the 1960s to add pineapple to pizza was a Greek immigrant in Canada.

The man responsible for this gastronomic innovation was none other than Sotirios “Sam” Panopoulos. He arrived in Canada by boat in 1954 with little more than a passion for his departed Greek homeland and a belief that boundless opportunity awaited in his adopted country.

By the early 1960s, the man born in August 1934 in the village of Vourvoura in the Peloponnese had built a small chain of restaurants in Ontario with his two brothers. Offering burgers and then pizza, which was becoming increasingly popular at the time, the brothers saw their businesses becoming all the more successful with each passing year.

The Greek creation of the famous Hawaiian pizza

The Hawaiian pizza was the result of a spontaneous experiment. Out of curiosity, one day, Panopoulos decided to add canned pineapple to a pizza merely to find out what the result would be. “We just put it on, just for the fun of it [to] see how it was going to taste,” Sam Panopoulos told the BBC in a 2017 interview he gave shortly before he passed away.

He and his brothers liked the contrast between the sweetness of the pineapple and the savory flavor of the ham. “We tried it first, [then] passed it to some customers. And a couple of months later, [they went] crazy [for] it, so we put it on the menu,” Panopoulos recounted.

They dubbed the pizza “the Hawaiian” after the brand of canned pineapple they used. At the time, pizza toppings were usually limited to mushrooms, bacon, and pepperoni, Panopoulos recalled.

A great legacy

The controversial foodstuff made an appearance on the international stage in February 2017, when Iceland’s President Guðni Jóhannesson declared that pineapple should be banned from pizza. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tweeted in return: “I have a pineapple. I have a pizza. And I stand behind this delicious Southwestern Ontario creation.”

Panopoulos sold his restaurant, called Satellite, in the mid-1970s, later opening Family Circle, another restaurant, in London, Ontario. He finally retired at the age of seventy-three in 2007. When not defending pineapple pizza to the world’s media, he spends his days as a doting grandfather (or ‘pappou’ in Greek).

Sam Panopoulos passed away on June 8, 2017 at the age of eighty-three. It was never his intention to cause such turmoil in the culinary world, nor was he bothered by the never-ending debate about the appropriateness of fruit-topped pizza.

His only intention was to break the pattern of using ordinary ingredients on pizza and to open up a world of new flavors—and that he did while making the very most of the great opportunities afforded him by the country that he and his brothers came to call home in their twenties.