Private Label Delivers!
Supervalu rethinks fresh pizza with its Culinary Circle offerings like Mango Habanero.
Bake and rise varieties remain the most popular in store brands, but brick oven, flatbread and other alternatives are becoming more visible. Frozen and fresh both show double-digit gains.
Most pizzas come round. Some come square. And from Supervalu, Eden Prairie, MN, a few even come oval – as part of an innovative artisan line under its Culinary Circle premium brand, sized to serve four slices.
Mango Habanero BBQ Chicken is the most novel variety in the line, which also includes Italian Style with Pepperoni & Salami, Quattro Frommagio and Spinach & Feta. The pizzas are shipped to stores frozen, but sold refrigerated, to be baked at home for 10-12 minutes.
Culinary Circle pizzas come shrink-wrapped rather than in boxes, But boxed store brand pizzas aren’t all the same kind any more.
Like most retailers, for example, Scarborough, ME-based Hannaford offers Bake & Rise pizzas, positioned against Digiorno’s, in Pepperoni, 4-Cheese, Deluxe and Supreme. That’s par for the course.
What isn’t par for the course is Hannaford’s Brick Oven Style Pepperoni pizza, which comes square just like those at restaurants, and even offers alternative instructions for baking it with a crisper or a softer crust. Also not par for the course is flatbread pizza like Spinach & Feta, with topping also including tomato, roasted garlic and basil with mozzarella cheese.
Target, Minneapolis, MN, is stretching the boundaries of private label with a line of handmade wood-fired pizzas, imported from Italy under the Archer Farms brand. These include Margherita and Spinach & Pesto. “Bring home authentic Italian flavor with wood-fired pizza by Archer Farms,” reads back panel copy, which also trumpets the fact that its single-serving size (7.6 oz) means that a “delicious, crisp, bubbling gourmet meal or snack can be on your table in minutes.”
Yet another example of thinking outside the pizza box comes from Ahold USA, Quincy, MA, with a potato pizza pie marketed at Stop & Shop outlets in the Northeast. Recommended as an appetizer, it tops a deep dish pizza crust with mashed potatoes, cheddar cheese and bacon. Another odd thing: it uses the new Stop & Shop icon, but not the Stop & Shop brand. Under the premium Simply Enjoy brand, meanwhile, Stop & Shop offers imported wood-fired pizzas like sliced Mozzarella, but even under the Stop & Shop brand it gets really creative.
A $4.95 crispy thin crust line, for example, includes a White pizza topped with a blend of mozzarella, fontina and parmesan cheeses, plus garlic. Then there’s BBQ Recipe Chicken, with white meat, spicy barbeque sauce, smoked gouda and mozzarella cheeses, red onions and cilantro. Garlic Recipe Chicken combines white meat with mozzarella cheese, garlic, Bordelaise sauce and chopped parsley. Individual lean thin crust six-ounce pizzas include BBQ and Garlic chicken and reduced-fat pepperoni. By contrast, Stop & Shop’s $4.99 rising crust pizza line is pretty standard stuff: Four Cheese, Supreme and Pepperoni.
Under its Great Value economy brand, redesigned this year to look a bit like old-time generics, pizzas at Walmart, Bentonville, AR, are actually anything but generic. A line of focaccia crust pizzas at $4.50 offers Three Meat, Surpreme and Vegetable Medley – that last is topped with tomatoes; green, red and yellow peppers, mushrooms and red onions. A $3 line of crispy thin crust pizzas includes Mediterranean, Margherita and Sicilian Recipe; while Walmart’s rising crust line embraces Chicken, Bacon & Ranch Sauce and a Three Cheese-Meat combination as well as the more familiar Pepperoni.
Frozen pizza still dominates private label sales, and sales were up 35.8% to $313.9 million for the 52 weeks ended 9/5/2009, according to Information Resources, Inc. (IRI), Chicago, IL. Refrigerated pizzas in store brands were up 19.1% to $40.8 million, with raw pizza crusts and dough posting a 30.8% increase to $10.5 million. Dry pizza crusts could be the next big trend; private label sales soared 749% to $3.1 million. And pizza crust mixes showed a 50% gain to $1.2 million. Do these latter figures have anything to do with the economy, or are more pizza lovers simply in a do-it-yourself mood?
There’s no doubt that pizza lovers do love their pizza. They love it so much that if it isn’t convenient to sit down for a slice, as might be the case while watching sports on TV, they’ll opt for pizza snacks of one kind or another. Wegmans, Rochester, NY, offers 20-oz. packs Pizza-tizers, snack size items in Cheese, Pepperoni and Pepperoni & Sausage varieties, plus mini-pizza bagels in 31-oz. club packs and, for do-it-yourselfers, regular and wheat pizza crusts in 12 and 16-inch sizes and even wheat pizza dough.
All those are in addition to standard items like Bake & Rise pizzas in Chicken Parmesan, Four Cheese, Pepperoni, Roasted Vegetable and Three Meat versions. An Italian Classics line includes Capicola & Salami, Grilled Vegetable, Margherita and Mushroom & Onion, while French bread varieties include Cheese, Deluxe and Pepperoni. Beyond that, there are a number of medium hot and cold fresh pizzas to go. Shoppers can call in their orders, including their choice of one to three toppings among Extra Cheese, Pepperoni, Italian Sausage, Ground Beef, Chicken, Bacon, Ham, Mushrooms, Garlic, Black Olives, Sweet Peppers, Hot Peppers and Onions.
Full-size hand-made wood-fired pizzas under the Archer Farms brand at Target, Minneapolis, MN, include Buffalo Mozzarella, Roasted Tomato, Four Cheese and Spinach and Goat Cheese, but there are also 7.6-oz. versions of Margherita, Spinach & Pesto, and others. Another full-size thin-crust pizza is Roasted Garlic Chicken. At Stop & Shop, standard individual pizzas include Pepperoni, Cheese and Deluxe.
Safeway, Pleasanton, CA, offers really huge – 49.5-oz. – fresh pizzas under its Signature brand, as well as well as standard sizes under the Safeway and other brands. Harris Teeter, Matthews, NC, sticks to standard sizes for its Fresh Foods Market take-and-bake pizzas, But perhaps the most unusual pizza-related item is a pizza crisper under the Domestix bakeware brand from Topco Associates, Skokie, IL.
