MaMa Rosa's Pizza

by MaMa Rosa's

1979 – 2020 GONE FOREVER

Gone since the end of 2020, confirmed by Schwan's itself in a March 2021 statement to the Sidney Daily News citing the prolonged impact of COVID-19 and a focus on its top sellers. Plenty of write-ups date the death to 2021 because that is when the news broke — the company's own wording puts it at the end of 2020. The brand was founded in 1979 and the pizzas reached shelves the following year.

Mike Gilardi started trucking pizzas from Sidney, Ohio to Kroger stores in 1980 and ended up with the best-selling refrigerated pizza in the country — the one in the cold case rather than the freezer, sold on the idea that it had never been frozen at all. Schwan's ended it at the close of 2020 without much ceremony.

🧾 One more thingNobody lost a job and the plant never went dark: Schwan's kept all of its Sidney employees and the 158,000-square-foot pizza factory, and simply turned the lines over to Red Baron, Freschetta and Tony's. The brand died; the building that made it is still making pizza.

Filed under: Frozen & Dairy · the ’70s & earlier

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