A hamburger shop, a delivery driver and a borrowed nickname.

Hungry Howie’s began in 1973 in Taylor, Michigan, a suburb south-west of Detroit. WDIV’s ClickOnDetroit, reporting in March 2013, says Jim Hearn opened the first Hungry Howie’s that year by converting a small hamburger shop into a carry-out and delivery pizzeria. The Tampa Bay Times, writing the same month, describes the starting point the same way — a small hamburger joint that Hearn bought in a Detroit suburb — and says he had been raised in nearby Dearborn. English Wikipedia puts the first shop on Telegraph Road and says it soon became a hangout for students from the nearby Taylor Junior High and Taylor Center High schools.

The name is a joke that stuck. A 2013 column in Franchise Update magazine, written for the chain’s 40th anniversary, explains it. In the 1970s, the column says, the busiest restaurant in nearby Ypsilanti was called Hungry Charlie’s. Hearn, then in his thirties, was admired by his younger managers for his success in business, and they nicknamed him “Howie”, after the eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes. Put the two together and the shop had its name: a borrowed restaurant format, a borrowed nickname.

The other half of the partnership arrived from behind the wheel. Steve Jackson delivered pizzas for Hearn at the first location, according to WDIV and to the Franchise Update column, and the two became partners in 1976; the column says Jackson joined forces with Hearn to open the second location that year. Hearn, the Tampa Bay Times says, did not like Michigan winters. After opening a run of stores in Michigan he moved to Florida and became a resident of Palm Harbor, on the Gulf coast, from 1982.

Franchising, two home states and a partner who stayed.

Franchising came next. Wikipedia says Hearn and Jackson decided in 1982 to franchise the operation and awarded the first Hungry Howie’s franchise in 1983; the 2013 Franchise Update column dates the start of franchising to 1982. With Hearn in Florida and the original business in Michigan, the chain built up in both states, and the same column notes that the brand’s heaviest concentration was in Michigan and Florida, where broadcast advertising made sense, while newer markets were reached by direct mail.

Hearn stayed close to the stores. The Tampa Bay Times recalled in 2013 that he used to slip unannounced and unrecognised into Hungry Howie’s locations and quietly place an order, to see for himself how ordinary customers were being treated, and that he was known to deliver pizzas personally from several shops in north Pinellas County. Franchisees quoted by the paper remembered him turning up late on weekday nights to help, mop included.

Hearn died in Florida in March 2013, WDIV and the Tampa Bay Times reported. Jackson, who had been his partner since 1976, was the company’s president at the time, and he spoke about Hearn at the company’s 2013 convention: “He was a leader and a visionary and we will miss him, but his legacy will carry on.” The 40th-anniversary celebration followed a month later, according to Franchise Update.

The company today is Hungry Howie’s Pizza & Subs, Inc., headquartered in Madison Heights, Michigan, in Metro Detroit, according to Wikipedia, which lists pizza, calzone-style subs, chicken wings and tenders, breads, salads and desserts on the menu. In 2025, Wikipedia adds, the chain added a Detroit-style square pizza to its menu.

Design and documentation.

A pizza or pasta chain meets its customers in a handful of physical places before anyone opens a menu: the sign above the door, the box or bag that leaves the shop, the counter where an order is placed and the board that lists what can be ordered. Each of those surfaces carries the name and the colours, and each has to work at a different distance, from a fascia read across a car park to a box lid read at a kitchen table.

Some restaurant formats put the kitchen in view, with an assembly line or an oven behind the counter, so the preparation area becomes part of the interior design and the menu board doubles as an ordering guide. Other formats keep the kitchen out of sight and lean on the dining room, the drive-through lane or the delivery packaging instead.

Each guide in this group looks at the brand rather than the food: who started it and where, who has owned it since, and how its name, logo, signage and restaurant interiors are documented in dated, independent sources, with anything the company says about itself marked as its own account.

A flavoured crust as a brand line, and a box that turns pink.

The phrase the chain has built its identity around is Flavored Crust. Hungry Howie’s promotes itself as the “Home of the Flavored Crust Pizza”, and the 2013 Franchise Update column describes the business as known by the same line. Wikipedia says the idea came to Hearn and Jackson from a franchisee who put sesame seeds and butter on his crusts; the company tested flavoured crusts in a few stores and rolled out a range of flavours in 1985, and the Tampa Bay Times dates the introduction to the mid-1980s. The crust flavours are named on the menu — butter, garlic herb, cajun, sesame and others. Wikipedia notes that an Italian herb crust replaced the onion crust in 2023.

The other recognisable piece of Hungry Howie’s design is seasonal. Since 2009 the chain has run a campaign called Love, Hope & Pizza in support of the National Breast Cancer Foundation, and during October its pizza boxes turn pink. The Franchise Update column traces the idea to the recession of 2009, when, it says, the company chose to print pink boxes rather than cut prices, and Wikipedia says the October boxes and the donations tied to them have continued since.

The same 2013 column describes a broader refresh around the brand’s 40th birthday: a new store prototype with “a fresh, contemporary look and feel”, existing units converting to the new look, and television advertising in a deliberately quirky “Howie’s Ad Agency” format, with targeted direct mail carrying the brand in markets where broadcast was not practical.

For a design guide, Hungry Howie’s shows how a regional chain builds an identity on a single product phrase — a flavoured crust — and a once-a-year change of box colour, under a name that began as a staff joke. Compare it with Jet’s Pizza, another Metro Detroit family chain, and Domino’s, which also grew out of Michigan delivery. For this guide we use crust orange, October pink and flour cream with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Hungry Howie’s’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.