COCOONING, WITH PIZZA.

A year ago, we showed the quintessence of plenitude.

Many of those pizzas are prepared in Wisconsin, or originated there.  "Twitter users were dumbfounded when Milwaukee resident Michael Bradley shared a video of thousands of pizzas inside what appears to be a Woodman's grocery store last week."  Although some of the brands are now manufactured elsewhere, there is proper Wisconsin mozzarella on many of them.

Unfortunately, a crunchy thin crust is difficult to adapt to freezing and transporting, which keeps the Milwaukee style pizzerias going.

If getting that crunchy crust right in a ready-to cook frozen pizza is hard, it's not for lack of trying.

During the lockdowns Our Political Masters were still telling us were two weeks to slow the spread, the supply chain getting frozen pizza to the grocer was working well enough, according to NBC News.

For weeks, Americans have been coping with the uncertainty surrounding the widespread coronavirus pandemic by stockpiling necessities, creating shortages of everything from toilet paper to hand sanitizers.

At the same time, shoppers have also taken solace in the comforting thought of having an easily-prepared, adequately satisfying meal tucked away in their freezer: the frozen pizza. In March, Americans bought $275 million worth of frozen pizzas, which was a 92% increase over the same period a year earlier, according to data analytics firm IRI.

And for the modern shopper, it makes sense — filling your freezer with frozen DiGiorno, Red Baron and Stouffer’s french bread pizzas can provide a much-needed respite from cooking and is typically cheaper than takeout.

Yes, if you could find a takeout place still open. Finding a place to dine in was even harder during those shutdowns.  The pizzerias had the idea long ago of selling pizza to be heated up at home.

As early as 1950, pizza restaurant owners in the U.S. had started offering refrigerated pizzas for customers to cook in their own homes. In June 1950, The New York Times wrote that the trend of refrigerated, “ready-to-cook pizzas” had recently become popular in Boston, leading to a New York City baker named Leo Giuffre selling similar pizzas in his own city for 49 cents each.

Around that same time, some restaurant owners started selling frozen versions of their pizzas that they could store longer than the refrigerated ones and sell to customers looking to cook them at home. In 1950, a man named Joseph Bucci in Philadelphia filed the first official patent for frozen pizza, titled “Method for Making Frozen Pizza.”

In that patent application, Bucci mentions issues with quick-freezing pizza dough, including the need to eliminate excess moisture that “renders it soggy and unpalatable” by applying an “edible sealing agent” to prevent tomato sauce from permeating the dough when it bakes. Unfortunately, it’s anyone’s guess what Bucci ultimately did with his patent, because by the time it was granted in 1954, various businesses had already been putting frozen pizzas on U.S. grocery shelves for a few years.

The manufacturers are still struggling with soggy crusts. That might be a consequence of technology and the laws of thermodynamics: to get a proper crunchy crust and the melted cheese requires a refractory brick, wood or coal fired oven, and those are rare in your typical household. Over the years, the frozen pizza types kept working on their offerings.

America’s frozen pizza business was mostly made up of regional players until the 1960s, when a few businesses started to achieve national fame. Married couple Rose and Jim Totino began mass-producing frozen pizzas from a plant in St. Louis Park, Minnesota in 1962. (A decade earlier, when the couple took out a loan to open an Italian restaurant in Minnesota, Rose had to bake a pizza for her bank’s loan officer because he’d never heard of pizza.)

By the 1970s, Totino’s became the country’s top-selling frozen pizza (annual sales jumped from $10 million in 1970 to $50 million in 1974, Forbes reported in 1975) and the couple sold their business to the Pillsbury Company in 1975 for $22 million.

(Today, Totino’s is even better known as the leading purveyor of frozen pizza rolls — bite-size dough pockets filled with cheese and sauce that top the frozen appetizers and snacks category with over $600 million in annual sales for the brand, according to IRI.)

Those Totino's Party Pizzas were pretty tasty compared with a lot of what was on offer in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but creative destruction worked its way.

And, in 1966, the Simek brothers of Medford, Wisconsin pivoted from selling pizzas in their bar, The Tombstone Tap, to a business selling frozen pizzas to other nearby taverns. They called their product “Tombstone Pizza” and by 1984 the company was one of the country’s largest frozen pizza distributors with over $100 million in annual sales. Two years later, Kraft Foods bought Tombstone for an undisclosed amount.

Meanwhile, frozen food delivery company Schwan’s finally entered the frozen pizza business in 1970 with the purchase of Salina, Kansas-based pizza manufacturer Tony’s. Schwan’s nationwide distribution network helped boost Tony’s into a national frozen pizza brand that sold $80 million-worth of pizzas annually by the mid-1970s, according to Forbes.

Then, in 1976, Schwan’s expanded its pizza business by launching Red Baron, which is now one of the country’s leading frozen pizza brands with over $570 million in annual sales as of 2017, according to Statista. Schwan’s also started selling its frozen pizzas to schools in the 1970s, and within four decades the company owned 70% of the school pizza market.

Tombstone caught on in Madison in the early 1970s; alas, I finished high school long before the dietitians even considered adding pizza, no doubt the adjectivists compiling the weekly menu would call it "Italian pizza with a savory sausage?"  But there was even more creative destruction to come.

Red Baron pizza is far better than bad. At its best, it's a pleasantly tacky treat that's superior to its competition—that includes DiGiorno, the best-selling frozen pizza brand. When DiGiorno came to market in 1995, it was the first frozen pizza to offer a rising crust that expanded into soft, chewy pizza dough when cooked. This helped the brand compete against fresh-baked takeout and delivery pizzas, hence the brand's long-running slogan: It's not delivery. It's DiGiorno.

DiGiorno's rising crust pizza was a triumph of industrial innovation that launched the brand to the top of the frozen pizza sales charts. It was also a heavy, bready, crust-dominated pizza that could be enjoyable for a few bites but was simply too dense to truly enjoy after more than a slice. The sales figures say millions of frozen pizza fans disagree with me, but I find Red Baron superior for its balance of peppery sauce, molten cheese, and thin-but-not-too-crackly crust.

Red Baron's relative lightness makes it ideal when consumed late at night after a drink (or several) when your local delivery spot has closed for the evening. My favorite local pizzeria stops delivering around 10 p.m. on weeknights. Red Baron, in contrast, respects my night-owl tendencies; as long as I've got a box in my freezer, I can have a warm and crispy pie ready in about half an hour, regardless of the time.

Red Baron's around-the-clock availability is complemented by its almost absurdly low price point. Even in an expensive grocery market like Washington, D.C., a whole pepperoni pizza—which provides a little more than 1,300 calories—typically sells for roughly $7, and supermarket sales occasionally bring the cost down to half that. My favorite local delivery option starts at $22, and that's before add-on toppings, delivery, and tip. Red Baron might not taste quite as good, but it's a fraction of the cost.

According to Reason's Peter Suderman, the Red Baron deserves placement in some future culinary hall of fame. "The debate about the best pizza will never be resolved, but perhaps someday the industrially produced wonder that is Red Baron will finally make the list."

And according to a recent map, I'm living in about the right place given my preference for sausage, mushroom, and onion with a thin crunchy crust.

When it comes to sheer volume of sales, though, one state has all the others beat: Wisconsin is the nation’s leader in frozen-pizza purchases on Instacart, followed by North Dakota, Iowa, Missouri and Minnesota.

It’s also quite possible Wisconsin leads the country in per-capita consumption overall, according to executives within the industry. Chris Zelch, of Nestle’s frozen pizzas division, told the Appleton Post-Crescent in 2019 that Wisconsin was the largest consumer of its pizza offerings, which include DiGiorno, Tombstone, Stouffer’s and California Pizza Kitchen, among others. The same year, Nick Fallucca, an executive at Milwaukee-based Palermo’s Pizza, told Spectrum News that lots of the cheese and meat used for the pizzas comes directly from the state, too.

And hurray for all those choices in the freezer display! Tombstone are still good, Red Baron are still good, DiGiorno offer choices other than that rising crust, and yet my current favorites are from less well-known, sometimes local, providers, who knows, maybe there's a future Tombstone among them.