Attention, fashionable, urbane, 21st-century pizza lovers: By some reckonings, that pie you savored a few nights back—the three-cheese concoction on a whole-wheat crust topped with pesto, zucchini, baby spinach, bits of pancetta and extra-virgin olive oil—was not, in fact, pizza at all.

To pizza purists such as Antonio Pace, who founded the Verace Pizza Napoletana Association (VPNA) in Naples, Italy, some 22 years ago, “pizza,” by definition, is only truly pizza when it’s prepared in accordance with the traditions of Naples, Italy, where the dish is generally agreed to have originated. And a true Neapolitan pizza contains just a handful of ingredients—namely, plum tomatoes, flour, salt, yeast, all-natural bufala mozzarella, and fresh basil. It is cooked in a wood-burning oven, and the dough is mixed by hand and shaped on a marble slab. According to the VPNA’s Web site, where the group offers information on training and certification in the art of true Neapolitan pizza-making, everything else is really just so much…well, they never specify exactly what everything else is, but it’s safe to presume that the VPNA would consider pies such as the one described above grossly inferior to the genuine article, or at the very least wholly inauthentic.

Only a handful of foodstuffs are capable of inflaming passions, inciting arguments, and spawning allegiances among otherwise well-adjusted adults, and pizza, like regional barbecue, is one of them. And that fact alone means we should give some thought to how this elegantly simple quick-service standby might be adapted to help drive transactions and boost check totals.

The VPNA’s hardline point-of-view on pizza is admirable for its clarity and fidelity to the originators’ vision, but we in the new-product development arena are fortunate that this strict interpretation hasn’t been adopted by U.S. consumers. Here in the U.S., pizza has become a terrific excuse to put an entire crockpot dinner on a tasty, oven-baked, portable carrier. Americans today practically revel in the scrumptious inauthenticity of pizzas such as those served at California Pizza Kitchen’s (CPK) 180 outlets, where pies teeming with barbecued chicken, Mexican salsas, pears, feta and gorgonzola cheeses, and Japanese eggplant are as much a part of the menu as mozzarella and tomato sauce. And for every CPK outlet, there are dozens of other local and regional chains and one-off outlets that claim their own fanatical fans. Here in the San Francisco Bay area, Gordon Drysdale, former chef and proprietor of the haute cuisine favorite Gordon’s Fine House of Eats in the city’s South of Market district, has won over local pizza mavens with Pizza Antica, a casual chain serving thin-crust creations such as an asparagus, tarragon, lemon, and parmesan beauty and a most unusual pie featuring heirloom potatoes, caramelized onions, and white truffle oil.