U.S. MRE Menu #23 Pepperoni Pizza Slice | The Military's Incredible Shelf-Stable Pizza

Today on The MRE Experience, we’re reviewing a 2022 production U.S. MRE Menu #23: Pizza Slice, Pepperoni — one of the most talked-about modern MRE menus ever made. For decades, pizza was one of the most requested items by U.S. service members, but it was also one of the hardest foods to engineer for a combat ration. A normal slice of pizza has everything food scientists hate in a shelf-stable product: bread, sauce, cheese, meat, moisture, fat, acidity, and oxygen — all sealed together in a pouch for years without refrigeration. The challenge was not simply “making pizza.” The challenge was making pizza that could survive the military’s MRE requirements: long storage life, rough handling, extreme temperatures, and still be safe and recognizable when opened in the field. The crust could not mold. The sauce could not soak through and destroy the bread. The cheese and pepperoni could not spoil. The whole slice had to remain stable for roughly three years. This menu became famous because it reportedly took around 20 years of serious development, testing, reformulation, and production problem-solving before it finally made it into the MRE lineup. Some early shelf-stable pizza work goes back even further, making this one of the longest-running food-science challenges in U.S. ration history. The estimated cost is difficult to pin down because it was not one simple project with one public price tag. It involved years of Natick food science, lab testing, contractor work, shelf-life trials, packaging development, soldier acceptance testing, and production scaling. Realistically, this was a multi-million-dollar effort over time — not because one slice of pizza is expensive, but because making pizza survive like an MRE is an enormous engineering problem. In this review, we’ll open up Menu #23 and see whether the legendary shelf-stable pepperoni pizza lives up to the hype. Is it a military food-science breakthrough, a morale booster, or just one of the most over-engineered slices of pizza ever made? Let’s find out.