Pizza Hut Australia has launched a pizza ordering app for a Windows phone. This launch follows significant investment in Pizza Hut’s online ordering and digital business, which grew 50 per cent last year.

Anup Jain, the head of marketing and food innovation at Pizza Hut Australia, said “Currently, mobile phone orders account for 25 per cent of Pizza Hut’s online sales and we anticipate this trajectory will continue as more Australians acquire smartphones.

“Considering digital is a key focus for Pizza Hut, it made complete sense to partner with Microsoft and Nokia in developing an app that can be used across all Windows Phone handsets, allowing more of our customers to order their favourite pizzas directly from their handsets.”

The new Pizza Hut app was developed by Altaine, with Microsoft and Nokia in support, and is now available on all smartphones running Microsoft’s Windows Phone operating system.

Key features include:

• Creating or modifying pizza choices and saving them for future orders
• Streamlined ordering
• One touch favourites so customers can order their popular pizza with a single tap
• Setting a delivery time so customers receive their pizzas when they want to
• And coming soon. a ‘Live Tile’ countdown timer on your start screen showing the progress of your pizza at a glance

To celebrate the launch of the new Pizza Hut app, Facebook fans will be given the chance to win one of five Nokia Lumia 800 phones as well as $100 worth of pizzas to share with their office buddies. The competition will run for five days and starts on Monday, 21 May 2012; check it out here.

On top of its growth in the digital space, the pizza franchise network also plans to open 20 to 25 new stores each year with a goal of 500 stores within the next eight to 10 years. This year the company has opened five stores.