Paul, I found a New York Times article from 2004 on the history of frozen pizza and a technical innovation in 1995 -- more recent frozen pizzas may be much better as a result [my home made fast version prevents me from commenting first hand]:
IN strictly frozen-pizza terms, the year 1995 was every bit as momentous as 1066 or 1492. Before that date, frozen pizzas were a gourmand's worst nightmare: overly chewy crusts topped with bland sauce, rubbery cheese and meat specks tougher than jerky. Then came Kraft Foods' first pie sold under the DiGiorno brand name, and the industry was reborn.
Different from its cardboardlike predecessors, the DiGiorno pizza featured a rising crust, a food technology coup. Kraft's researchers were inspired in large part by three patents taken out in 1983 by General Foods of White Plains, which combined with Kraft in 1989. The patents covered the preparation and safe storage of frozen, yeast-leavened dough, a complex process involving the meticulous addition of hydrophilic colloids for stability and surfactants to ''facilitate flour hydration and initial dough development.'' Kraft also developed modified atmospheric packaging, which keeps the pies bathed in an inert gas rather than oxygen, which erodes the dough.
The result was a product that tasted a lot more like something that might be on the menu at the local pizzeria, rather than like astronaut food. In the two years after DiGiorno's debut, total annual frozen-pizza sales soared $500 million, to $2.2 billion. And in 1998, DiGiorno became the best-selling brand of frozen pizza, a title it has not relinquished since.
Success, of course, breeds competition, and the frozen-pizza battle has been particularly ferocious. The industry's No.2, the Schwan Food Company of Marshall, Minn., released its own rising-crust pie in 1996, under the Freschetta label. Kraft later sued Schwan, accusing it of obtaining vital pizza secrets by hiring a former Kraft contractor. The suit was settled in 2001.
DiGiorno remains the top dog of what is now a $2.78 billion industry, with annual sales near $500 million, but 2003 was not a banner year; according to Information Resources Inc., Kraft's sales of frozen pizza declined 0.6 percent last year, versus an industrywide sales increase of 2.8 percent. Schwan had a sales bump of 4.2 percent, largely on the strength of a pie intended to taste as if it had been baked in a brick oven.
DiGiorno's response is the Thin Crispy Crust pizza, scheduled to hit supermarkets nationwide today. The $5.79 pies will come in Supreme, Pepperoni, Four Cheese, Four Meat and Grilled Chicken, and, for the moderately health-conscious, Tomato & Spinach. The taste aim is something approximating the Neapolitan-style pies popular in the Northeast.
John Boswell, vice president of the Kraft Pizza Company, is tight-lipped about DiGiorno's research agenda, but the brand's next competitor could be less traditional. The National Frozen Pizza Institute, the industry's primary lobbying group, recently persuaded the Department of Agriculture to relax its rules governing the composition of frozen pies. Before the change, a so-called white pizza, for example, featuring a surfeit of cheese in lieu of red sauce, could not legally be called a pizza. ''It had to have tomato sauce to be called a pizza,'' Mr. Boswell said. The new rules, he added, ''have broadened our opportunities, and they're consistent with consumers' changing palates.'' In other words, the next frozen-pizza milestone will probably not involve a high-tech crust, but a high-tech sauce. Ranch dressing, perhaps?
Link.
