Walking the frozen pizza aisle of a grocery store can be overwhelming, with untold options for flavors, crusts, shapes, toppings, and brands. There are old-school names like Red Baron and more modern, famous brands like DiGiorno. But one frozen pizza brand has been around for longer than all of those. Totino’s is the oldest mass-produced frozen pizza brand still available in stores today, and it started with a dedicated and crafty couple in Minnesota in the early 1950s.
The brand famous for the pizza rolls that likely dominated your adolescence actually began as Totino’s Italian Kitchen in Minneapolis, MN. A child of Italian immigrants, Rose Cruciani was born in 1915 in Minneapolis, where she later met and married Jim Totino, who was a baker. Rose Totino started making her own pizzas at home and bringing them to PTA meetings. From there, she began a small catering enterprise, and later received a $1,500 bank loan to open a small pizzeria in 1951.
Allegedly, the people issuing the bank loan had never heard of pizza before, so Totino had to make them one of her famous pizzas before securing the loan. Totino’s Italian Kitchen started as take-out only and quickly grew in popularity — serving as many as 500 pizzas a day — thanks to Rose Totino’s boots-on-the-ground advertising by handing out pizza samples and appearing on local television stations.
Read more: 10 Red Baron Frozen Pizzas To Buy, And 5 To Avoid
A woman ahead of her time
Billy F Blume Jr/Shutterstock
Within just 11 years, Totino and her husband started another food endeavor, this time selling frozen pastas and, later, bake-at-home frozen pizzas under the name Totino’s Finer Foods. At the time, most frozen pizzas on the market had terrible crusts reminiscent of cardboard, so the Totinos worked diligently to improve the dough and crust of frozen pizzas, which involved frying the dough. This company also saw great success, expanding nationwide, and it was later purchased by the Pillsbury Company in 1975.
Pillsbury initially offered Totino $16 million, but she held out and eventually sold the company for $20 million instead. But Totino didn’t sell her company and ride off into the sunset. Rather, she became the first-ever female corporate vice president at the Pillsbury Company, a major achievement for a woman in the 1970’s. In 1979, Totino received a patent for a frozen pizza crisp crust that she and her husband invented.
In 2001, General Mills acquired the Pillsbury Company and folded Totino’s into its corporate umbrella. Totino’s is still widely distributed and has since grown to dominate the frozen pizza market. Pizza rolls, which are trademarked by General Mills, are arguably the most recognizable Totino’s product today, but true to its origins, Totino’s still makes a wide variety of frozen pizzas. Given credit for her massive part in the company’s success and for innovating frozen pizza crust, Rose Totino was posthumously inducted into the Minnesota Inventor’s Hall of Fame in 2008.
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Read the original article on Tasting Table.
