Pie Fight

0

California Pizza Kitchen Inc.’s frozen pizzas have a kick, one that’s walloping the competition.


It’s a frigid lineup that includes spicy Jamaican jerk chicken, mixed Portobello mushroom, Sicilian, white and Thai chicken all of which are muscling offerings by Wolfgang Puck Worldwide Inc. and other competitors off the shelves.


The Los Angeles restaurant company, best known for its successful chain of sit-down eateries, recently has made major inroads in the supermarket aisles. Its premium thin-crust pizza is far removed from the cardboard-like varieties that have dominated the sector. California Pizza’s frozen pizza sales are expected to triple this year and the company continues to add new items, with garlic chicken being one of the latest entrants.


“If you look at it, particularly in frozen pizza, it is really the thin crust that has been driving the growth,” said Chad Mulder, the California Pizza brand manager at Kraft Food Inc., which began licensing the company’s products in 1997. “Our presence is much bigger than it ever has been.”


California Pizza’s frozen pies racked up more than $70 million in sales last year for Kraft foods. That’s a nearly 55 percent leap from $45.3 million sales in 2002, according to data provided by Mintel International Group Ltd.


For California Pizza, those sales have helped bump up the franchising and licensing revenues it collects to nearly $5 million in fiscal year 2005 from $3.7 million the prior year. At the same time, Mulder said Kraft has stopped tracking Puck frozen pizza sales because they have “dwindled down to almost nothing.”


Dana Moncrief, a Puck spokeswoman, suggested that the chef’s foray into the frozen pizza coolers isn’t over. “We have some things in the works, but it is not something we are prepared to talk about now,” she said.


Still, California Pizza’s slices don’t have the freezers completely to themselves. Other mainstream food companies have been pushing into the premium frozen pizza category.


Freschetta, owned by Schwan Food Co., maker of Red Baron and Tony’s frozen pizza, is taking on California Pizza with its Brick Oven items, counting BBQ-style chicken, Thai chicken, and smoked ham and Portobello mushrooms among its offerings.

No posts to display