Chuck E Cheese is denying rumors started by YouTube star, Shane Dawson that they reuse uneaten pizza.
The family-friendly chain, catered towards young children, found itself at the center of controversy after Shane Dawson, the host of Investigating Conspiracies, posted a video claiming that the restaurant collects uneaten pizza slices from the dining area and fits them back together to form and re-serve them as “fresh” pizzas.
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“The claims made in this video about Chuck E. Cheese’s and our pizza are unequivocally false,” a spokesperson for the company responded to the video, posted on Monday, in a statement to PEOPLE. “No conspiracies here – our pizzas are made to order and we prepare our dough fresh in restaurant, which means that they’re not always perfectly uniform in shape, but always delicious.”
In his video, posted to his YouTube channel that boasts more than 20 million subscribers, Dawson attempted to prove his theory by visiting a Chuck E Cheese location and ordering two pizzas, both of which he claimed were served with weird, uneven edges. One pizza, a half pepperoni, half plain cheese pizza, he claimed looked as though it had been two halves pushed together.
“So I noticed this when I was 8 years old or something. I was like, wait a minute, how come all the pieces are different?” he said in the video, going on to add that it was “just a theory.”
“I honestly was like the pizza will come out, it’ll be normal, we can laugh about it, whatever,” Dawson said when the pizzas were delivered to his table. “This is like a problem.”
Dawson went on to cite other examples of mismatched pizzas that he had seen on the internet, though he failed to take his cameras to the kitchen or talk to employees.
By early Wednesday morning, the video had been viewed more than 14 million times, with several people putting their support behind the conspiracy. However, a number of past and present employees have denied the speculation.
In a thread on Reddit, one person explained that Chuck E Cheese’s “hand cut all of the pizzas. We have to do it fast because we usually have 5 more coming out right behind it. I’ve seen millions of pizzas cut and they always look a little off, especially if the person is new and just learning.”
A current Chuck E Cheese employee confirmed on Twitter that “we literally do not recycle our pizza slices,” adding that she’s seen “the kitchen guys make fresh pizza all the time a new order comes in and see the gameroom guys throwing out left over pizza on table.”
