FILE - This Oct. 5, 2010 file photo shows the front of a Pizza Hut restaurant in Los Angeles. Pizza Hut says it will remove more artificial ingredients from its pizza pies in the next year. Pizza Hut says the preservatives BHA and BHT will be removed from all its meat by July 2016. Artificial preservatives in cheese will be cut by next year. Chicken used as pizza topping will be free of human antibiotics by March. (AP Photo/Reed Saxon)

NEW YORK | Pizza Hut is gearing up for the Super Bowl by hiring 11,000 people in the U.S. to cook up its pies, deliver them to hungry customers or manage its restaurants.

The Super Bowl is the busiest day of the year for Pizza Hut, and it expects to sell more than 2 million pizzas during the Feb. 5 football game.

It plans to fill as many of the positions as possible before the Super Bowl, but those that aren’t will be filled afterward. A Pizza Hut spokesman says the chain typically adds more workers before the big game and estimates it had about 4,000 to 5,000 openings at this time last year.

Pizza Hut, which is owned by Louisville, Kentucky-based Yum Brands Inc., has about 8,000 U.S. restaurants.

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