The owners of Hawthorne’s New York Pizza and Bar accidentally hit upon a unique selling proposition like no other: a spicy chicken-wing pizza that supposedly induces labor in pregnant women. Now they’re ready to open their ninth store in the Charlotte, North Carolina region.
Known to many customers as The Inducer, the pizza features Buffalo chicken wing meat, mozzarella and Hawthorne’s housemade medium-hot Buffalo sauce. The brand’s website points to more than 450 claims of pizza-induced labor that brought new babies into the world since 2017.
“Pregnant women from all over Charlotte and surrounding areas are coming to get what people are now calling ‘The Inducer,’” the pizzeria’s website states. It notes that customer Ali Aldrich was the first to claim that the signature pizza sent her into labor. “She ate the spicy pizza for dinner, went to the hospital and gave birth to her daughter the next morning,” the Hawthorne’s site reports.
The Charlotte Observer has reported that Aldrich had her baby in 2010. Since then, other women have reportedly insisted that the pie sent them into labor.
According to a Good Morning America (GMA) segment that aired in 2017, one week that year saw five expectant women give birth shortly after eating The Inducer.
“It all started with a Facebook alert to Hawthorne’s pizza account from one of our moms, Henley (Schmiedel), and she wanted just to let us know and report that, after four hours of having our pizza, she went into labor and had the baby. It’s just a great story,” owner John Adams told the GMA team.
Another new mom, Ashley Fleming, told GMA that she learned about the pizza from her mother-in-law and drove 40 minutes to a Hawthorne’s location to try The Inducer. Later that same day, she found herself in labor with her own baby.
As more reports came in, the restaurant’s owners decided to keep the pie’s original name, the Buffalo Wing Pizza, on the menu when they opened their next location, but added The Inducer in parentheses. After all, not every customer is pregnant and impatient to meet their baby, but many love a good New York-style pie topped with spicy wings.
Dr. Jennifer Ashton, an ABC News senior medical contributor, said she believes it’s all just a coincidence. “Listen, the Italians invented a lot of things,” she said. “They did not invent the induction of labor. There’s a lot of myths about spicy [food], full moons, getting busy. None of them have been really conclusively proved.”
Schmiedel told The Charlotte Observer that a group of her friends swore by The Inducer and told her to give it a try. “Like most women in the last few weeks [of a pregnancy), I was ready to go,” she said. “I barely could wait to see my baby girl.” She started eating The Inducer around 7:30 p.m., and her water broke four hours later, she said.
Whether The Inducer can really send women into labor or not, the rumor has made Hawthorne’s New York Pizza and Bar a front-of-mind dining option for soon-to-be moms. “When the first person posted that our Buffalo Wing Pizza induced their labor, several new moms followed up to say the same thing,” co-owner Michael Adams told The Charlotte Observer. “I bet my wife wished she had known about the inducing pizza when she had our two kids at nine pounds plus.”
Mothers-to-be in Concord, North Carolina, will get a chance to try The Inducer for themselves when Hawthorne’s new store opens there in mid-November. Operations Manager Tracy Pannell recently told the Observer that plans call for three more stores to open over the next 18 months.
“All three of our owners are born and raised in New York, so they know what pizza and Italian food is supposed to taste like,” Pannell said. “Everything we serve is dangerously good.”
