【读物】环球见闻录 April 1st

Hello and welcome to Postcards, a show helping you reach across borders without actually taking a trip. I'm Shen Ting. Are you tired of home-delivered pizzas always arriving all soggy in its box? Help is at hand. An Indian entrepreneur has come up with a new way of packaging pizza so that it stays hot and crispy during transit. Here's Ning Yan with today's first postcard from India. Reporter: Fresh out of the oven, but soggy once it reaches your door. It's the scourge of people all over the world who like their pizza thin and crispy. Now, a Mumbai businessman has designed a pizza delivery box that he says keeps the food as hot and fresh as when it came out of the oven. The secret? Let some air out of the box. Vinay Mehta says the problem with packaging and delivering hot food is largely down to poor ventilation: "If there is no effective ventilation provided then the steam turns into condensation cycle, turns into water particle, it falls back on the food, and that water particle absorbs the latent heat of the food. And the problem is acute at the bottom where there is no space and ultimately that steam turns into water particle and gets absorbed by the crust." Mehta runs a packaging and print design company and has been dealing with corrugated cardboard boxes for more than 30 years. He says most pizza delivery boxes have holes in the side to release steam. But heat rises, so Mehta's VENTiT boxes allow steam to escape from the top and bottom. The box uses three layers of cardboard - the third being a corrugated sheet placed between two flat surfaces. Holes are cut into the two flat surfaces which allow the steam to rise and pass through the box. "If I wanted the steam to pass through the board, either I have to make a hole, but then when I make a hole, it is a fear of contamination. That's not a good design. So I went to the last layer, made a hole, and there is the corrugation material, intermediate layer which already has a corrugation, so I knew that it can act as a channel or a path to pass through the vent." This simple innovation has been recognized by Scott Wiener, the New York based pizza expert and author of "Viva La Pizza - The Art Of The Pizza Box." "The gentlemen has collected 650 boxes all over the world, and he told me out of all of them, ours box is the only box which has a additional utility and he says it is world's best box and that gives me immense happiness and pleasure." Mehta is already selling about 100,000 VENTiT boxes a month to Mumbai's main pizza delivery outlets including Juno's Pizza. Aditya Shah, co �Cowner of Juno's Pizza, says the boxes really work. "So what we mainly used to specialize in was thin and crispy pizzas. So when you deliver pizzas, they would go thin, but the crispiness would go, because of the moisture. So after using the VENTiT boxes, we could give crispier pizzas, they were less soggy, they were better for our customers." Metha says similar boxes can be used for packaging other hot food including fish, chicken and chips. Riddhi Vora regularly enjoys a home delivered pizza. "Earlier pizzas, they used to be soggy from the base and there is a lot of moisture in it. These feel fresh, and it is definitely a better bite experience." Metha says it took him more than 6 years to get the patent granted for his VENTiT box. He now has patents in more than 100 countries. He is also looking for international partners to manufacture and distribute VENTiT boxes all over the world.