Frozen Pizza Goes Local

“To know your enemy, you must become your enemy.” Legendary Chinese military leader Sun Tzu doesn’t get quoted in a lot of pizza industry publications, but it’s entirely relevant given a trend I’ve noticed recently. Frozen pizza is becoming local. What was once seen as a lowly food of desperation is now being embraced by mom and pop pizzerias across the country.

Scott Wiener
Founder, Scott’s Pizza Tours and SliceOutHunger.org

The first independent I remember seeing in grocery stores was Artichoke Basille. The Greenwich Village pizzeria garnered enough attention to attract the A&P supermarket chain, leading to an exclusive deal in 2011 to manufacture and package frozen pizzas using Artichoke’s recipes. Frozen pizza isn’t a huge business in New York City, so the move was designed to spread the Artichoke brand while simultaneously nurturing a product line that could potentially be sold to a competitor for big bucks. Unfortunately those competitors are few and they are huge, so Artichoke dropped the line after five years. Between delivery logistics and slotting fees, they nearly lost their shirts.

Brooklyn’s Table 87 pitched their frozen product as an alternative to the typical factory pizza, focusing on the fact that they bake theirs in a coal-fired oven. The concept was enticing enough to land them a segment on ABC’s Shark Tank in 2015, which resulted in a $250k investment from Lori Greiner. Roberta’s Pizza, also located in Brooklyn, uses the same marketing approach with a wood-fired pizza. They had to do major recipe modifications so their pizzas could handle the rigors of being frozen and reheated. They upped the hydration in their dough and applied their house-made mozzarella only after the bake to account for the effects of their customers’ home ovens.

Zuppardi’s Apizza in West Haven, CT got into the game before frozen pizza was cool, baking and freezing pizzas in-house and selling them directly to customers back in the early 1990s. They realized their customers were buying frozen pizza at the grocery store, so why miss out on the opportunity to meet that need? It was a brilliant move that required only a freezer, vacuum sealer and some extra cold storage. Only in the past year has the pizzeria expanded into supermarkets, which came with new requirements. The USDA requires a completely separate kitchen with its own set of equipment. That required an investment of $150k, but with a presence in 21 local supermarkets (plus 10 in Texas) and a sales record already outperforming some national brands, it appears to have been a smart move.

The decision to approach the frozen pizza market from a local rather than national perspective is what differentiates Zuppardi’s approach from that of Artichoke and Table 87. While Artichoke almost went under trying to compete with the rock-bottom prices of huge national brands, Zuppardi’s positioned theirs as a premium local product and sold to customers already familiar with their name. Pizzerias can even reach fans across the country by shipping directly (like Lou Malnati’s, Aurelio’s and Giordano’s in Chicago) or selling through online marketplaces like Goldbelly. The downside to getting into the shipping business is space; you’ll need room for shipping boxes, packing foam, and dry ice. The upside is providing your fans across the country with a taste of home.

It’s clear that the food industry is having an affair with words like local and craft, so why wait for the national frozen pizza companies to encroach upon your territory? It’s inevitable that we’ll see ancient grains and sourdough crusts in the grocery store, so now might be the right time to carve your own home in your customers’ freezers.

Scott Wiener is the founder of Scott’s Pizza Tours in New York City and SliceOutHunger.org.