Chuck E Cheese Pizza

Audrey Whalen, Reporter

Is Chuck E Cheese recycling their pizza? Popular internet personality Shane Dawson, says he thinks it might be. Dawson added new fuel to a bizarre, decade-old conspiracy theory that he posted a YouTube video promising an in-depth investigation into misshapen pizzas.

Photos uploaded to Instagram, Yelp and TripAdvisor show the crusts on Chuck E. Cheese’s slices don’t always line up to form a perfect circle. To Dawson, who has more than 20 million subscribers on YouTube and whose videos have been viewed more than 4.7 billion times since 2005, this merited further research, according to Boston.com.

The theory was roundly denied by representatives of Chuck E. Cheese’s, who characterized the idea as “unequivocally false” in statements to the Verge and Buzzfeed. “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,” a company spokesperson said, according to the Eater.com.

But people are still hung up on the fact that more images are surfacing of uneven pizza’s. Some photos show that pizza slices are too short and skinny to have been cut at the same time. And who just stops cutting a pizza once they’ve cut one slice?

As a national chain with more than 600 locations worldwide and presumably thousands of employees over its 39 years of existence, it seems it would be difficult to keep that secret quiet for long. A seven-month-old Reddit discussion involving self-identified former Chuck E. Cheese employees, for example, does not mention a conspiracy to repurpose used pizza, though it does mention a lot of other gross situations that only an insider would know, according to Eater.com.

But some employees are refusing to comment on the situation due to loss of job or a lawsuit. It would not be the first time Chuck E Cheese has been the center of lawsuits, so it makes sense that people would be afraid to lose their job for speaking out.