The Frozen Pizza Cradle
How Midwestern Ghosts of Long-Gone American Dreams Haunt Your Supermarket's Frozen Pizza Aisle.
Walk down the frozen-food aisle of a Key Food or Foodtown or D’Agostino’s in New York and you’ll find a modest selection of frozen pizzas. They’re typically the usual national brands: DiGiorno, California Pizza Kitchen, Celeste, Newman’s, Red Baron, and, because this is New York, maybe Ellio’s. Altogether, they’ll take up maybe one freezer compartment, tops.
That would not be your experience in Wisconsin. When you see a sign above a supermarket aisle at Pick ‘n Save or Piggly Wiggly that says “Frozen Pizza,” you better believe it. The frozen discs stretch on for the entire length of the lane and there are sometimes dozens of brands. Alongside those mentioned above, you’ll find Tombstone, Jack’s, Tony’s, Totino’s, Orv’s, Pep’s, Roma, Park Plaza, Liuge’s, Lotzza Motzza, Brew Pub, Belletoria, Portesi, Palermo’s, Home Run Pizza, Heggie’s, Emil’s, Village Pub and many more. It’s dizzying.
Here’s the scene at a Sentry supermarket in Milwaukee:
Wisconsin is frozen-pizza central. Its citizens consume more iced-down pies per capita than any other state. The region even has a nickname in the frozen-pizza biz.
“We call it the pizza cradle here,” said Adrianna Frelich, Marketing Manager at Bernatello’s, a frozen pizza manufacturer, in an article in Wisconsin Life in 2023. “So anywhere in Wisconsin, Minnesota, a little bit into Iowa, Nebraska, is really the large consumers of frozen pizza.”
There are reasons for this:
Unlike New York or Chicago—two pizza capitals—the average consumer in Wisconsin in the mid-20th-century didn’t have access to brick-and-mortar pizzerias making good homemade pizza. So they came to rely on the frozen version.
Wisconsin is the Dairy State, so an affection for any food covered in cheese is natural.
Pizza goes well with beer, another product Wisconsin historically makes and drinks a lot of.
And, as Matt Selvig, the Advertising and Promotions Manager of Bernatello’s Foods, put it in that same article, winters are long. “That November through March time frame,” he said, “everybody kind of wants to stay in and turn their oven on.”
There’s one more reason that Wisconsinites eat a lot of frozen pizza. Many of the most famous brands today began in Wisco taverns and restaurants. The customers developed a taste for pizza there and took it home.
I grew up eating frozen pizza. There was no snobbery about it in my family; we genuinely loved it. Pizza nights were popular and we kids would fight over the slices. Of course, there were few other options. If you wanted fresh pizza from a restaurant, there were the chains. We had Pizza Hut and Shakey’s. But going out was expensive and, quite frankly, the pizza was not that much better.
The origins of frozen pizza in the United States lie on the east coast. The earliest innovators in the field were in Boston, New York, New Jersey and Philadelphia. In 1954, one Joseph Bucci patented a workable method for freezing pizza. The Celentano Brothers in Newark began as a specialty shop for Italian goods in 1947 and started selling frozen pizza a decade later.
But frozen pizza really came into its own in the Midwest in the 1960s. By the time I was a kid in the 1970s, it was commonplace. Every household always had a few pies tucked away in the freezer.
The gold standard in frozen pizza at the time—1970s-’80s—was Tombstone. It was a dollar or two more expensive, but worth it. The ingredients were just better and the sauce memorable.
Little did I know then that I was eating local. Tombstone was a Wisconsin brand. The pie was created in 1962 by two brothers, Joseph "Pep" Simek and Ronald Simek, who ran a tavern called the Tombstone Tap in the north-central town of Medford. (It stood opposite a graveyard, hence the macabre name.)
The story goes that Pep broke his leg dancing one night and, while laid up, spent the next several weeks tinkering with various pizza recipes in order to provide a new eating option for his patrons. He didn’t know much about Italian cooking—a cook in Chicago whom he consulted only told his what spices not to use. But he eventually hammered out a recipe that became the house specialty.
The pies were immediately popular. Soon, the Simeks were making pizzas for other taverns, campgrounds, gas stations and bowling alleys in the area. Expansion came quickly, with factories built and expanded. By 1976, Tombstone pizzas were in supermarkets. By the 1980s, it was a national product. In 1981, sales had grown to $62 million.
“Our goal,” said Ron Simek in 1978, “is to become the General Motors of pizza in the Midwest.” (Sadly, he would get his wish, but not in the way he thought.)
The brand got a lot of exposure through its witty “What do you want on your tombstone?” series of commercials in the 1980s. But the one I remember featured this ear worm jingle:
It’s the small-town, home-grown, made-the-way-you-make-your-own pizza
Tombstone!
It’s the ladled up and loaded on, with lotsa mozzarella on the pizza
Tombstone!
We pile on the goodness,
We’re loaded with real cheese
Other frozen pizza brands have similarly mom-and-pop, small-business origins. Like many Bourbon brands, most of the old frozen pizza brands are named after people. And those names belonged to the actual persons who created the brands.
Each story constitutes its own separate version of the American Dream, which was alive and well in the mid-20th century.
Here are a few thumbnail sketches of the most notable labels:
Jack’s: Jack was John William “Toby” Elrick, who started making pizzas in 1960 out of his garage in Little Chute, Wisconsin, a tiny town southwest of Green Bay. Jack died at the age of 46 in 1965, but his wife Irene carried on. Soon, the frozen pizzas were in nine Midwestern states. James Geerts was the owner by the time Jack’s was sold to Kraft in 1992. Nestle owns Jack’s now and annoyingly glosses over the origin story of the brand. The web site reads, “But wait, who’s Jack? Glad you asked. But that’s not for us to answer. After all, when a hectic day calls for a good meal, you know Jack better than anyone.”
Totino’s: The Totinos were Rose (nee Cruciani) and Jim Totino, a married couple in St. Louis Park, Minnesota. They opened an Italian restaurant, Totino’s Italian Kitchen, in 1952 and entered the frozen pizza business in 1962. (The family story is that, in order to convince the bank to loan the Totinos the money to open their restaurant, Rose had to make a pizza and serve it to the bankers.) By the 1970s, Totino’s was the top-selling frozen pizza in the United States, with $50 million in sales in 1974. Pillsbury bought them for $20 million the next year.
The 4’11” Rose—5’,4” if you count the bouffant hairdo—was always the face of the business. She stayed on as a vice-president at Pillsbury. Rose is credited with developing a crispier crust for frozen pizza while at Pillsbury, and was later inducted into the Frozen Food Hall of Fame. Yes, there is a Frozen Food Hall of Fame; people named Birdseye and Stouffer are in it. Rose was the first woman to be so honored.
Totino’s is an unusual case in the frozen-pizza world, because today people hardly know about the pizza at all. The company is almost entirely known for the tiny calzones known as pizza rolls, which were introduced in 1994 and today completely dominate that market. Jim Totino died in 1981, Rose in 1994.
Jeno’s: This is another Minnesota success story, one perpetuated by Jeno Paulucci of Duluth. Paulucci comes off like a character out of Glengarry Glen Ross, a hard-charging super-salesman. His story is filled with angst and his is the most corporate personality in the frozen pizza annuls.
Before he launched Jeno’s frozen pizza line in the 1960s, Paulucci created the Chun King line of Chinese food in 1947, while he was still in his early 30s. He sold it to Nabisco in 1966 for $66 million. He then created Jeno’s. Unlike most other frozen-pizza giants, Paulucci didn’t get his start in a restaurant or bar. He was a prepared-food entrepreneur from the start. He is also the man who invented the pizza roll later made famous by Totino’s.
Jeno’s got into a fierce turf war with Pillsbury when that corporation made serious inroads in the frozen pizza market with its Totino’s brand. Paulucci even lured away Pillsbury executive George Masko to fight his old employer. Eventually, Paulucci gave up and sold his company to Pillsbury.
Jeno was described as “an abrasive, mercurial man” in an article published in the Orlando Sentinel after his death, one who routinely revised his will, including three times during the last year of his life. He died at 93 in 2011 in Florida, where he amassed a real estate fortune. His end was messy. Two Minnesota lawyers got Paulucci to sign a document transferring control of his $150 million estate to them, just seven weeks before he died. Everyone wrangled over his multi-million dollar estate and the courts were flooded with 16 different law suits.
Mama Celeste: Of all the frozen pizza brands, Celeste feels the most fake. That photo of a kindly old Italian mother in the corner of the individual-sized pizza boxes never seemed real. But there was a real Mama Celeste. Celeste Lizio, an Italian immigrant from around the Naples area, started as a grocer in Chicago. She and her husband Toto then opened the Kedzie Beer Garden in 1937 and became known for their food. Later, the restaurant’s name was changed to Celeste’s. Then, just as with Tombstone, other bars began asking for her pizzas. By 1962, she had left the restaurant business behind and went full frozen-food. Quaker Oats bought her out in 1969. Lizio stayed on as a spokesperson. (That’s her in the 1980s commercials.) She died in 1988. The slogan of the early commercials was “no skimping” and, later, “abbondanza.” (Anyone who’s had a cardboard-like Celeste pizza-for-one lately can tell you that neither of those two slogans still apply.)
The Lizio legacy continued after Celeste died. Celeste’s daughter, Clara, opened an Italian restaurant in Woodridge, Illinois. It’s still there and, yes, they serve pizza. We were in Chicago recently and drove an hour outside the city to visit Clara’s. There are pictures of Celeste and Toto everywhere. (Clara passed away two years ago.) According to the hostess, the restaurant uses Celeste’s original recipes, including that for pizza. So if you want to taste what Celeste’s original pizzas were like, this is your best chance.
Tony’s: The business was begun in 1956 by Gregory J. “Tony” Paglia as an Italian restaurant called Tony’s Little Italy in Salina, Kansas. Paglia made pizzas to go and soon sold half-baked pies to local taverns and supermarkets. Tony sold the business in 1965 to his sister Ann and her husband Dick Barlow. The Barlows sold the restaurant in 1968 to concentrate on the frozen pizza business. Food delivery company Schwan’s bought the business in 1970. Paglia died in 1992 in Colorado. (Schwan’s is also responsible for the bizarrely named Red Baron brand of frozen pizza, which came out in 1976. Why would you name an American frozen pizza after an enemy German fighter pilot from WWI?)
Palermo: Founders Gaspare (Jack) and Zina Fallucca were Italian immigrants who settled in Milwaukee and opened an Italian bakery in 1964. They opened a pizzeria in 1969 and were soon making frozen versions of their pies. The brand kept expanding over the years, introducing an ever-expanding line of sister brands, including Screamin’ Sicilian, Connie’s, P’Mo’s and Urban Pie. Unlike many other frozen pizza entrepreneurs, the family never sold out. Palermo is still family-owned and based in Milwaukee. Gaspare died in 2012.
Orv’s: Orv’s, a smaller brand seldom seen outside of Wisconsin, was begun by Orville Koszitke in Appleton around 1970. Like many of his colleagues, Koszitke had tried pizza in Chicago and was attempting to duplicate that taste.
Roma: This is another smallish Wisconsin brand, but with a long history. In the 1960s, Davis Donnelly opened the Roman Inn Italian Restaurant in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. He soon began making pizzas—as Roma Pizzas—to sell to local grocery stores. As that took off, he bought a local creamery to make the pizzas in and incorporated the company as Dadco Food Products. He sold the restaurant in 1970. Roma Pizza was carried in stores all over the upper Midwest. Donnelly sold the company to Bernatello’s in 2000, while his pizza patents were bought by Schwan’s. Donnelly died in 2020.
Village Pub: You won’t find this product outside of Wisconsin. It has its origins in tiny Winneconne, Wisconsin, in 1979, where Tom Marquardt started selling frozen pizzas. He left the business in 2004, but a decade later his son Justin revived the brand. It is now based in Oshkosh. The Village Pub bar where it all began still stands.
Emil’s: Emil Caplene opened a pizza place in Watertown in 1961. I can’t find out much more about the company than that. The frozen pies are available in the upper Midwest.
Today, the frozen pizza market is controlled by a few food giants. In 1988, Tombstone was sold to Kraft. In 2010, Kraft sold it to Nestlé. Today, Nestlé also makes Jack’s, DiGiorno, Stouffer’s French Bread Pizza and California Pizza Kitchen. General Mills makes Totino’s and Jeno’s.
Still, Wisconsin loves frozen pizza so much that it is possible for a small state corporation to thrive selling the stuff. Bernatello's is a frozen pizza manufacturer based in Maple Lake, Minnesota, with an additional plant located in Kaukauna, Wisconsin. Their brands include Brew Pub, Bellatoria, Orv's, Roma, and Pizza Corner (from Pizza Corner Pizzeria in Valley City, North Dakota),
But the old tavern-to-grocery experience is still alive in Wisconsin. A few years back, I was scanning a freezer in a liquor store in Manitowoc when I spied a frozen pizza brand with the confusing name of Port Sandy Bay. It said it was from Two Rivers, the next town over. I bought a pie and then drove over the Two Rivers. Sure enough, there was an old roadhouse called Port Sandy Bay, founded in 1947. And they made pizza.
If you crave this sort of hyper-local experience, your best bet for landing a local frozen pizza is to patronize an independently owned liquor store or gas station. They are the businesses most likely to support a regional frozen-pizza maker.
Also, the local frozen pizza experience is becoming more common on the East Coast as well. New York pizza and Italian food icons like DiFara’s, Roberta’s, Table 87 and Rao’s now have frozen pizza lines and some of them are quite good.
My favorite Wisconsin frozen pizza story is the final chapter of the Tombstone history.
Pep Simek got rich selling the Tombstone brand to Kraft. After that, he dabbled in the hospitality industry, buying and selling hotels in Green Bay. But in 2000, he took back his legacy. After his non-compete clause with Kraft ran out, he created Pep’s Drafthouse Pizza, again working out of Medford. In a 2002 article, he was quoted as saying "We're back to using the original recipe. They [Kraft] changed the original all to hell."
Of course, it goes without saying that corporate culture kills everything. I stumbled upon a Reddit thread from nine months ago where Jack’s pizza fans were complaining that the quality had gone downhill, with recent pies having insufficient sauce and cheese. One commenter said, “All frozen pizzas taste like shit now. They ruined all of them in the pursuit of profit.”
I had a Jack’s pizza just a few weeks ago and must say I didn’t notice any difference. But nonetheless, I’m sure those devotees are probably right. I’m more a Tombstone man and I have noticed a decline in both quality and diameter. Shrinkflation is a real thing in the world of frozen pizza.
Still, I polish off a frozen pizza every time I visit Wisconsin. It’s a comfort food for me at this point. It takes me straight back to my childhood, as well as the region’s past, a time when men and women, looking to make ends meet, made pizzas in their bars, restaurants and garages and sold them to their friends.
Frozen Pizza Taste Test
While recently in Wisconsin, we stopped by a few local supermarkets and loaded up on a variety of frozen pizza brands for an at-home taste test. Here are our thumbnail reviews, in alphabetical order. I bought sausage or pepperoni or sausage & pepperoni pizzas in all cases, because that’s mostly what people eat in Wisconsin. We made all the pizzas in the same oven and according to their printed cooking instructions. All were sliced in a “party cut,” because I am psychologically incapable of cutting frozen pizza any other way.
Emil’s sausage and pepperoni: This was my first time trying Emil’s, a fairly obscure brand. The label says, “Caution: exceeds expectations.” Funny. The label does not specify what sort of cheese is used. This may be the greasiest frozen pizza I’ve ever encountered; most frozen pies emerge from the oven fairly dry but this had puddles of oil. It was a cracker-thin crust. The sauce didn’t have a lot of spice to it. The meats were average in flavor. Mary Kate liked it more than I did.
Jack’s sausage and pepperoni: Of the value brands—that is, $6 or less—Jack’s is the best, in my opinion. It has a very thin crust, and is made with low-moisture mozzarella. The sauce is good, with an above-average spice to it, though there is not enough of it. It’s very light and snackable.
Orv’s sausage and pepperoni: Orv’s piles it on. Whatever style you buy, there is going to be plenty of ingredients on top, leading to a fairly thick bite for a frozen pie. It’s almost heavy-handed and the abundance makes for a somewhat muddled flavor. But overall a solid product.
Pep’s Drafthaus sausage and pepperoni: This is the best frozen pizza we tried. Pep’s is the work of the original founder of Tombstone. It costs a lot more than most—$15!—but what you’re paying for is apparent. They use both provolone and mozzarella, which is laid on in thin discs on top of the pie. The large lumps of sausage, which were first rate, were all pork, not the pork-chicken combo that is more common these days. The crust is exceptionally crispy and the sauce very good. It tastes like a freshly made tavern pizza.
Red Baron pepperoni: I used to have a bias against Red Baron, because it had no back story and is so obviously a corporate product. But, as it’s one of the few Midwestern pies easily found in New York, I’ve had quite a few in recent years. And I have to admit there is little to complain about with this pizza.
Roma sausage and pepperoni: Roma was the smallest frozen pizza we tried; the size was verging on single-serving Celeste dimensions. This is a very basic pie. I tasted nothing but tomato paste in the sauce. Nor was the cheese very flavorful. It’s just sort of blah. There’s a reason the grocery was selling them 3 for $9.99.
Screamin’ Sicilian sausage: This is one of the lines from Palermo. The name is ironic, since this is a sold not as a thick square, but as a thin-crust tavern-style pie. The crust was pre-charred on the bottom and it’s the crunchiest frozen pizza I’ve ever had. It had a delicate quality you don’t often see in frozen pies. All the ingredients seemed of a higher quality. The sausage was actual pork. As for cheese, there was mozzarella, provolone, parmesan and romano! The price was $11 and worth it. I hate the ridiculous name and cartoonish packaging, though, which seems borderline offensive.
Tombstone sausage: I grew up with Tombstone and Tombstone still tastes like Tombstone, in my opinion—just a little less so. I could identify that savory sauce, with its slight sweetness and lurking baking spices, a mile away. It’s so distinctive, it tends to outshine the cheese, which is low-moisture part-skim Mozzarella. The crust has a crunch to it, but is not super crispy; more a pie-crust texture.
Village Pub extra cheese and sausage: This was an odd entry. It didn’t look like any other pie. The surface was blanketed in white cheese and the dark sausage lumps were large. It looked homemade and took the longest time to bake, 22 minutes. That said, they didn’t say what kind of cheese was used, and the cooked cheese had a plastic bite to it. The flavor was unique. I could see people becoming devoted to Village Pub, because it doesn’t taste like anything else. I can’t say it was good or great or anything; it was just different. And I guess that’s something.
Odds and Ends…
THE MIX SCOOP: Tadao “Tony” Yoshida, the under-the-radar hospitality mogul behind Angel’s Share, Dojo and Japan Village in Industry City—among many other businesses over the last 40 years—will add to his Industry City empire this fall. Yoshida plans to open JTUNES, a Japanese-style karaoke bar, and a bakery called Panya Bakery. Unlike the original Panya Bakery on Stuyvesant Street, now closed, the Brooklyn Panya will be larger and equipped to do wholesale business, providing baked goods for other restaurants and businesses. Both shops are expected to open this fall… Mexico City’s Rayo cocktail bar announced two new team members, welcoming Luis Miguel Cardona (Alquimico) as Head Bartender and Audrey Hands (Trailer Happiness, Havana Club) as Head of Strategic Partnerships and Guest Experiences. In addition, Miguel Bolanos, a member of the founding team of Rayo, has been promoted to Beverage Director overseeing the award-winning program… I was a guest on The Restaurant Guys, the podcast run and hosted by Mark Pascal and Francis Schott, owners of the New Brunswick restaurants Stage Left and Catherine Lombardi… I wrote about Clemente Bar, the new cocktail bar being opened by the team at Eleven Madison Park, for New York magazine. The bar opened for business on Oct. 6… Tony Durpetti, the founder of Gene & Georgetti, the legendary Chicago steak house, died last week at the age of 80. He was the son-in-law of Gene Michelotti, who co-founded the restaurant back in 1941… The Brooklyn cocktail bar Grand Army and the Gowanus outlet Threes Brewing joined forces on Oct. 1, with the bar’s kitchen staff doing a pop-up at Threes. The guest menu, which is described as having “classic-clam-shack-meets-burger-joint energy,” will include beer-battered cod, fried cauliflower, loaded crab fries and more… The new fall/winter cocktail menu at Clover Club in Brooklyn drops today… Nominations are now open for the 2025 James Beard Awards… Door County, Wisconsin, now has a source for first-rate hot dogs: Wally’s Weenie Wagon, located in downtown Bailey’s Harbor. Offerings included a Chicago Dog, a Bahn Mi Dog and a Wisconsin Dog (Vienna beef hot dog served on a poppy seed bun, topped with ketchup, mustard, fried onions and deep fried Renards white cheddar cheese curds)… In other Door County news, Trixie’s, the intimate fine-dining restaurant and wine bar in Ephraim, has closed after seven years in business and reinvented itself as The Fashionable. The owner is Mike Holmes, who was also the owner of The Wickman House and Taco Cerveza, now both closed… Monkey Thief, a new cocktail bar from the team behind Greenpoint’s popular Sama Street, will open Oct. 8 in Hell’s Kitchen (401 W 47th St, New York NY 10036). The bar is inspired by partners Avi Singh, Rishi Rajpal, and David Muhs’ upbringings and travels throughout Asia. The cocktail menu was created by head bartender David Muhs.
My favorite real life frozen pizza story is that the Mix’s own Mark Ward has always doctored up his frozens. When asked his secret he said: “ I add lots of fresh garlic, fresh jalapeño slices, halved cherry tomatoes fresh basil, black olives, chopped spinach. I really load up a basic frozen pizza (store brands are my favorite LOL) with lots of fresh toppings. I also like cooking quite a bit longer than recommended to get it nice and well done.”
Amazing! 👏👏👏
It was a fun taste test- but I’m shocked at how much better the Midwest pizza brands were to the regulars at our supermarket here in NYC. I think DiFaras is my fav East Coast brand.