The most beautiful pizzas you will ever see

There's a comic scene in the Sacha Baron Cohen movie Bruno, where the daft protagonist sits down with influential Israeli and Palestinian leaders, proceeds to confuse 'Hamas' with 'hummus' and ends up "making progress" towards peace by having both agree that hummus is a delicious and healthy food. 

In a similar vein, Vietnam's largest independent pizza chain, Pizza 4P's (get it?) thrives on the idealistic vision of bringing the world together by sharing food, happiness and "making the world smile for peace". It's all part of 4P's vision, mission statement and marketing. And much like the movie scene mentioned above, which surely can trivialise complex and serious issues, the restaurant and its agency have undeniably created something very beautiful nonetheless. 

For World Peace Day earlier this week, Pizza 4P's created three unique 'peace pizzas' which combine the flavours of nations in conflict and made them live in harmony on a pizza. One hundred percent of the proceeds from the sale of the peace pizzas will go to the UN Peace Building Fund. 

But the real beauty of the initiative is how they brought it to life, with the help of independent communications design agency Ki Saigon from Ho Chi Minh City. The agency came up with the idea of bringing ingredients from two conflict nations together on the same pizza and worked with 4P's chefs Shotaro Hirukawa and Natsumi Kobayashi over many months to carefully craft the three different pie combinations.

But the crowning touch was in how they transformed the 4P's pizza boxes to a 'garden of peace', re-engineering the pizza boxes to open to an intricate, handcrafted three dimensional flower exuding a calm, peace and tranquility.  Each unique flower blossom (27 in all) combines the colors of the two flags: Israel + Palestine; China + USA;  India + Pakistan. At a marquee 4P's venue, no less than 250 of these boxes are being displayed together as an art piece titled ‘garden of peace’ during this 'peace week'.  

But they didn't stop there. Taking ingredients and artistry to another level, artists used the exact spices and seasonings from each of the pizzas to create three stunning 'murals of peace'. 

“Our humble attempt is to give people a taste of peace through our Peace Day pizzas and hopefully make people see that peace is the one cosmic ingredient that makes everything better,” said Pizza 4Ps co-founders and chief executives Yosuke Masuko and Sanae Takasugi.

Campaign asked Ki Saigon partner Indraneel Guha to elaborate on the project:

How did you come up with the idea?

The journey started many months ago, when the Pizza4P’s team met with us with the intention to create a short film about their vision. When we heard about their vision of making the world smile for peace and values the company was founded on—compassion, kindness and hope—we felt it needed something much larger than just a film. In the process, we also felt a deep connection with the 4Ps founders and their team.  So, we began to explore various ways to bring their vision to life in a more visceral manner. The client gave us complete freedom and trusted us, which played a big part to bring this to life.

Which pizza seems to be the fan favourite so far? Why?

So far, people are trying all the Peace pizzas to our delight. There doesn't seem to be one favourite.

An immediate reaction is to worry that the lovely 3D paper art will be spoiled by the pizza or mistakenly tossed out with the pizza box. Is there a deeper message about peace and political realities, or are we just reading way too much into this?

We want to give people a sense of tranquillity and peace with the Pizza box. The pop flower can be detached from the box and kept. We have also created 500 pop up books with the flowers. Proceeds from the sale of the books also will go to the UN Peace Building Fund. 250 peace pizza boxes have been displayed at their marque venue as an art instillation for people to see, as well titled 'Garden of Peace'.

As far as the political realities of the conflicts go - we know that it is very sensitive and people can be very charged about it. rightly so. But our intention is to just talk about peace and hope in our way. We are trying to make a humanistic statement with this, not a political one.

When art emerges from something mundane it appears more surprising. Why don’t brands incorporate more artistry into the everyday?

We think more and more brands will look at craft and artistry into their expressions in the future. They are not doing it right now because they make up rules at the brief stage—for example strict media choice and then they refuse to craft something different or new. Or in some cases, lack of belief in arts and craft plays a role too.

Besides hoping for world peace, what do you hope anyone who sees the project takes away from it?

That peace can also be derived from something insignificant too, it depends how we look at it. And hope can blossom anywhere.

CREDITS

Client: Pizza4Ps
Creative agency: Ki Saigon
Creative Director: Kumkum Fernando
Art Director: Chung Hoang
Visualizers: Duc Luong & Quang Nguyen
Producer: Tue Nguyen & Khanh Tran
Planner: Indraneel Guha
Artist (Mural for peace & Flowers): Zac Beuhner
Official photographer: Wing Chan
Production house: VAIB
Videographer: Justin Ngiam
Animation house: Callimotion

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