The tiny piece of plastic protect your pie in your pizza,

Protecting pizza from pie,

Pizza’s most essential topping is a piece of plastic. Floating above the greasy circle of molten cheese, a small white sphere often stands on three narrow stilts. Placed directly into the pizza while hot, the stilted objects can get covered with red sauce, some cheese, and a lot of grease. My sister and I used to take these small white things and rinse them in the sink. They were just small enough to work as dining tables for Polly Pockets, or stepping stools for Barbie. They were fairly stable, and over time the box that held our toys accumulated them.

New invention to protect your pizza,

The best solutions are often the easiest, most simple ones. And in that regard, Vitale’s "package saver" is certainly an elegant design. Made of one piece of plastic and according to the patent able to "resist temperatures of as high as about 500° F," Vitale’s package saver became a standard across the United States.

According to Bob Conrad, the owner of Shadow’s Ridge Inc., a small Virginia-based plastics company, the cost of materials to create the pizza saver are "at most a penny" for the FDA-grade plastic. But the production of the pizza savers carries a hearty price tag. Conrad, whose company does not produce pizza savers, said Vitale would have needed a molding machine, a manufacturing space, conveyors, robots, storage, forklifts, and more to create the invention herself. He estimated the minimum cost to be somewhere between $500,000 and a million dollars.