Some businesses search for greatness. Others, like Great Kitchens Food Co., already have it in their name, and with it comes mighty expectations to do something special.

As the leader in supplying take-and-bake pizzas to supermarket and other retail delis, the management team at the Romeoville, Ill.-based company knows that the bar is high and living up to its given moniker must be earned. They’re accepting the challenge to take this segment of the pizza market to a new level by providing value and driving innovation that makes a point of differentiation in the market.

“You have to put the customer at the core of everything you do,” said Admir Basic, the company’s president and chief executive officer. “The point is that we will experiment. We will innovate. We will play with flavors, and if we see something in a restaurant, online or in social media, we will try to replicate it.”

Certainly, successful manufacturers in this competitive arena can’t be all things to everyone. However, Basic pointed out Great Kitchens strives to come close when a new business opportunity makes sense, and it can deliver on what it promises.

In many cases, he said, it’s all about doing small things in a great way to create customized, restaurant-style pizzas for private label accounts.

“We often do the products that other manufacturers shy away from,” Basic observed. “The one thing that differentiates us from other frozen pizza producers is our flexible manufacturing. We can apply eight or nine toppings on a pizza, and we’ll hand-apply toppings if we need to.”

There’s no topping Great Kitchens when it comes to flexibility. It’s built into every part of the business. Core to the manufacturing operation is the 155,000-square-foot facility in Romeoville, which houses six pizza topping lines.

Here, the versatile operation has the capacity to produce 100-million-plus lbs of pizza annually, including specialty items as well as traditional cheese, pepperoni, supreme and ultimate meat that make up 80% of the pizzas sold in the deli and freezer case.

Moreover, the operation provides the finishing touches on a bevy of crispy flatbreads, which have seen double-digit sales growth in the past five years, according to Basic. The top-selling varieties are Pepperoni and Mozzarella flatbreads, followed by Chicken Bacon Ranch, Buffalo Chicken and BBQ Chicken flavors.

Great Kitchens also produces seasonal varieties such as a Nacho Cheese pizza for the spring and summer grilling season or a Sausage Duo, which is a top-heavy meat pizza for the fall and winter. It even rolled out a new Cheeseburger pizza that gained popularity in the market, and that’s just a sample of what the operation can produce.

“We see flatbreads as an innovation vehicle, and we manufacture a lot of rotating flavors,” Basic explained.

Supporting the Romeoville operation is Great Kitchens’ 165,000-square-foot facility in nearby Chicago Heights, Ill., where the plant makes 85% of its crusts for the topping plant. The bakery runs one line that creates traditional, thin and biscuit crusts that range from 6.5- to 16-inch rounds to ovals, squares and rectangular ones — the largest being an 8-by-18-inch Street Pizza variety. Specialty items, such as stuffed and wood-fired crusts, are purchased from other third parties or imported from Italy.

In many ways, Great Kitchens is starting a new chapter since the former Aryzta North America pizza business was acquired in December 2020 by Brynwood Partners, an operational-based private equity firm that had previously owned several branded and private label food manufacturers since it was founded in 1984.

Among them was Wheeling, Ill.-based Richelieu Foods Inc., which it bought in 2005 and sold five years later. That gave the investment firm a taste of the pizza business and had them coming back for more. In fact, Henk Hartong, Brynwood Partners’ chairman and CEO, said he always admired Great Kitchens because of its lock on the take-and-bake pizza market and the inability of others to crack the code.

“One of the lessons then that we’ve applied to our businesses today is that if you are going to be in a space like private label or contract manufacturing, you need to have exceptional manufacturing and customer service,” he observed.

Basic said that operational premise was tested early on during the pandemic. In addition to securing a stable supply chain, Great Kitchens had to produce more 12-inch pizzas for the freezer case in addition to the 14- and 16-inch pizzas for delis. Overall, about 85% of its pizzas are sold in retail with the remainder in foodservice.

“We discovered a lot through that period of crisis. We learned how to adjust, leverage relationships with customers and grow relationships with customers and suppliers as well,” he explained. “Throughout COVID, we had superb fill rates, and we were there for our customers. The take-and-bake pizza category also got a lot of trial during COVID because the major frozen pizza manufacturers couldn’t keep up with capacity, and retailers asked us to help out. Anywhere you can place pizzas, they would fly off the shelf.”

More recently, Great Kitchens expanded into the branded pizza arena when Brynwood Partners in March 2023 acquired Brockton, Mass.-based Uno Foods, which produces Chicago-style deep-dish pizzas, strombolis and calzones sold under the iconic Pizzeria Uno name. In addition to providing a national presence in retail freezer cases, the purchase enables Great Kitchens to leverage its relationships in the take-and-bake market and bring these new products into the deli section.

“Deli is where our relationships are. That’s where our strength is,” Basic said. “We know the space, and we have the trust of our customers.”

For the freezer case, the 6- and 9-inch pizzas come in classic varieties such as pepperoni, cheese, supreme and sausage. Great Kitchens also packages its innovative flatbreads under the Pizzeria Uno name.

Transitioning into deli, however, required some adjustments. Because take-and-bake pizzas are typically purchased and consumed the same day, convenience is a driver, so the company had to reduce the bake time to a 20- to 30-minute range from 40 minutes to an hour for a typical frozen deep-dish pizza. The deli version has a smaller rim, which allows for a quicker bake, and it’s 7 inches in diameter vs. 9 inches for items sold in the freezer case.

Great Kitchens also reformulated the deep-dish pizzas so that they tasted like those made by the original Pizzeria Uno restaurant, which was founded in 1943 and inspired the Chicago-style pizza movement.

“We played with the crust’s hydration levels and fat content to make sure it delivered on what consumers would expect, which is that pie-like crust,” Basic said. “We then added premium toppings that the brand deserves.” 

Next, it refreshed the Pizzeria Uno brand and its packaging and added romance copy on the packaging that linked the brand to the original restaurant. What else would you expect from a company headquartered in Romeoville near Chicago?

“The previous box was black and red that blended into the sea of black and red found in the frozen pizza section,” he said. “We changed it to a white box that pops out in the freezer case. We’re also paying homage to Pizzeria Uno’s green logo, and on the back are replicas of old photos of the original restaurant.”

The most recent initiative involves calzones and strombolis, which are a couple of East Coast favorites that can be found in restaurants and mom-and-pop shops along the Atlantic seaboard. 

“When we bought a deep-dish pizza business, we did not even think about strombolis and calzones,” Basic recalled. “Then we saw the way that they’re made, which is basically with a handmade, burrito-style fold, and we tried them and said, ‘This might be one of the most delicious things we’ve ever eaten.’ ”

To research the category, the company taste-tested every product it could find in the market, then began fine-tuning the products for the retail and foodservice market. The 9-oz strombolis come in Steak and Cheese, Pepperoni and Cheese, and Italian Meat and Cheese varieties. 

Meanwhile, the 6-oz calzones come in Steak and Cheese, Pepperoni, Italian Meat, Chicken Bacon Ranch, and Buffalo. Some 20-oz calzones are sold out East, where the extra-big size is popular, and there’s also an Italian Beef with Giardiniera for consumers who love the Chicago specialty sandwich.

The company also offers a 3.75-oz version of the Steak and Cheese calzones that are sold in 10-packs under the Tastefulls brand as well as 6-oz breakfast handhelds. For delis, the company offers Steak and Cheese, Pepperoni and Chicken Bacon Ranch calzones.

This article is an excerpt from the November 2024 issue of Baking & Snack. To read the entire feature on Great Kitchens, click here.