It’s Not Delivery, It’s …

Today in Tedium: You know an industry that had a real comeback during the pandemic? Frozen food. For some reason, the people who didn’t DoorDash felt compelled for the first time in years to eat Healthy Choice, Banquet, and Hungry Man. Frozen food saw its biggest increase in years, with a 21 percent leap in sales in the U.S. alone last year. (In March of 2020, it was a a 53 percent year-over-year increase.) But one frozen food stands crust and pepperoni above the rest. With tonight’s Tedium, I’d like to focus on one specific kind of food put on ice, the frozen pizza, and why it’s become an icon of prepared American food. Turn on your science ovens and I’ll see you on the other side. — Ernie @ Tedium

Today’s Tedium is sponsored by Intent. More from them below. ⤵️

This is the most important patent in history. In. History.

The postwar pizza boom that brought us frozen pies

The idea of making ready-to-cook pizzas is very much an idea that came into its own in the years after World War II. But grocery store pizza didn’t always come in frozen form.

For example, ready-to-cook refrigerated pizzas appeared on the East Coast in 1950, with the first Roma Pizzas first showing up in Boston, then making their way down to New York City later that same year after Bostonians quickly fell in love with the refrigerated pies. The idea, per a 1950 New York Times article, was the brainchild of a guy named Leo Giuffre, whose work helped presage a multi-billion-dollar global industry.

Examples of frozen pizzas showed up around the same time, with one of the earliest patent applications being filed in 1950 and granted in 1954. The invention, by one Joseph Bucci, was intended to get around the problems with quick-freezing dough so that the pizza would have the right texture when cooked. Per the patent filing:

It has been found that even when foods of this category are quick-frozen, and then thawed out, heated and served, unwanted moisture penetrates the doughy mass and renders it soggy, and unpalatable.

It has also been found that certain. doughy constituents of foods, such for instance as the doughy portion of tomato pies as hitherto known, are irregular in consistency and appearance. Thus, for instance, according to present-day practice in making tomato pies, the dough is laid in a pan, and holes are punched in the dough to prevent air bubbles from forming during the rising and baking process. As a result, the dough is irregular in consistency, frequently gummy in some spots: and hard in other spots. In addition, the sauce which is poured over the: dough often penetrates through the punched-out portions and burns against the pan.

One object of my invention therefore, is to provide a frozen food having a doughy constituent adjacent a constituent which is of a moist or liquid consistency when at room temperature, said frozen food being so constituted that unwanted moisture may not penetrate said doughy constituent, regardless of the temperature of the food.

Bucci and Giuffre, however, weren’t the only ones getting in on the sudden demand for easy-to-make pizza at home. A Massachusetts paper had ads for frozen pizza in the early months of 1950, and in Akron, Ohio in 1952, a man named Jack DeLuca took advantage of a summer break in for restaurants in the city to come up with his own line of frozen pizzas, which became popular enough that his pizzas were in 300 shops by the end of that year.

Perhaps the real ground zero of the frozen pizza, however, might be the Chicago area, where a gigging musician named Emil De Salvi came up with Pizza-Fro, a brand of frozen pizza in 1951, and the pizzas had made it to neighboring states in the midwest in the ensuing years. Per one 1954 Chicago Tribune report, De Salvi had sold 5 million pizzas in a two-year period. Not that the data point was cheered on.

“This statistic, of course, is as loathsome as a Liberace joke,” columnist Thomas Morrow wrote. “It gives a man an uneasy stomach to think of these 5 million blobs of dough splattered over the landscape.”

Of course, the main turning point for frozen pizza came when the phenomenon went national—and a Minnesota woman named Rose Totino is widely credited for that success. Having first experienced pizza for the first time when visiting friends in Pennsylvania, she often made it for her friends, according to a 1994 Minnesota Star-Tribune obit. This eventually led Totino to launch an Italian restaurant with her husband Jim, and by 1962, the couple had started making frozen pizzas themselves.

Soon enough, their pizza brand went national, becoming the top-selling brand of frozen pizza in many of the markets where it was located. Eventually, Pillsbury bought the company out in 1975—with Rose Totino successfully convincing the grocery giant to pay $20 million, instead of the $15 million they originally offered.

It was Pillsbury’s first foray in the frozen food aisle—a place where many mealtime battles would be fought in the ensuing years. Frozen pizza was just too hard a market to pass up.

If this material didn’t exist, Elon Musk would have had to invent it.

Why all the frozen stuff you microwave—including pizzas—has packaging covered in metal and plastic

The secret sauce of frozen pizza—and a lot of other frozen foods—isn’t really a sauce at all.

Instead, it’s plastic. Gray, shiny plastic, mixed with aluminum powder and placed on paperboard, is the thing that makes microwave pizza somewhat crispy instead of a New Miserable Experience.

That wasn’t the first invention that promised crispiness, however. The microwave susceptor, the gray plastic surface used in many kinds of microwaveable foods. The technology was invented by Pillsbury in the 1970s—around the time the company acquired Totino’s—but didn’t find success on the market until the 1980s. In the patent filing granted to Pillsbury, pizza was used as an example of a type of food that benefited from this metallic plastic film layer.

While other forms of packaging had been used to heat food in the past—check out this 1954 patent from Raytheon, a company better known as a major U.S. defense contractor—Pillsbury’s system was different, it said, as it prevented food from getting soggy.

The benefit of a suceptor is that it takes the radiation hitting the packaging and turns it into a tiny oven that helps make the food crisp. And unlike most other technology of its kind, it could be thrown away after you were done eating lunch.

“By contrast with the prior art, one major goal of the present invention is to find a way to provide an inexpensive and disposable microwave food heating container or package useful for shipping, heating and when desired to hold food as it is being eaten as well as to provide an improved method of distributing and heating foods with microwave energy,” the Pillsbury patent, granted in 1980, states.

Hot Pockets would not reach their full potential without microwave susceptors. (vandys/Flickr)

The susceptor technology, originally designed for the company’s frozen pizzas, quickly became a key element of microwaving anything with bread, with Hot Pockets being perhaps the best-known product to use them. Around 1985, Pillsbury sold retailers on the idea, and soon enough it was everywhere—which helped greatly diversify the number of processed foods being sold in the frozen aisle.

The metal-plus-plastic-plus-paper became such a key part of our microwave experience that it was sold on its own in infomercials. Cathy Mitchell, an iconic As Seen on TV infomercial host, even did a full-hour cooking guide based around Microcrisp, which was literally sold with every bread-based frozen food you could find in stores.

You may hate the nature of processed foods, but the fact of the matter is, for better or worse, the microwave susceptor has done more to change the way we cook foods than any other piece of technology in the last 40 years … with, of course, the exception of the Instant Pot.

And we have frozen pizza to thank for that innovation.