The Oldest Frozen Pizza Brand You Can Still Buy

After Italian immigrants brought pizza to the United States, the way we thought about pizza changed; this iconic dish became increasingly cheaper, faster to make, and easier to find. Still, that was not the last event that would transform the world of pizza. As home freezers became a commonplace kitchen fixture, pizza was pulled into the world of frozen dinners in the early 1950s. The early options for frozen pizzas were prepared by restaurants or regional pizza makers and swiftly replaced "ready-to-cook pizzas." In the 1960s, however, the first frozen pizza giant entered the game: Totino's. 

After opening a plant in Minnesota in 1962, Rose and Jim Totino's frozen pizza business, Totino's Finer Foods, took off. Totino's took the frozen pizza market by storm, its product swiftly becoming the top-selling frozen pizza in the United States by the early 1970s. Even though Jim and Rose Totino sold their business to the Pillsbury Company in 1975, you can still easily find Totino's pizza in the frozen dinner aisle of your grocery store.

As other corporations dove into the frozen pizza business, sporting recognizable brands such as DiGiorno or Red Baron pizza, Totino's hold on the market weakened. Now popular for its frozen pizza rolls, Totino's pizza continues to offer a variety of frozen pizza products. Known as Party Pizzas, these frozen pizzas contain two servings within their iconic square shape. While Totino's supreme Party Pizza is one of the worst frozen pizzas for supreme lovers, the pepperoni and triple cheese varieties have withstood the test of time.

Many are drawn to Totino's, and other varieties of frozen pizza products, because of the cost, convenience, and contentment that they get. Still, while the pull of frozen pizza hasn't changed very much since the inception of this type of food, the quality has. In the early days of frozen pizzas, consumers would enjoy products made with a kind of care that is difficult to provide at the corporate scale. Nevertheless, when a frozen pizza isn't quite up to par with quality expectations, you can count on hacks, like this frozen pizza crust upgrade, to take your frozen pizzas to the next level.