It’s Not Delivery …

By Andrew Jenkins in Food on Oct 17, 2006 6:26PM

If you can’t find a Gino’s East location somewhere near you — hopefully you can, since there are 11 of them — you can now pick up your own frozen Gino’s deep-dish from a nearby grocery store. Nostalgic Food Distributors of Hoffmann Estates recently bought the licensing and recipe for Gino’s pie, and has since been producing 5,500 pizzas a day to be shipped around Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin.

Frozen pizza is big business in U.S. grocery stores, third in sales behind ice cream and salty snacks, making it a tough market to break into. And since the frozen deep-dish category has traditionally been unsuccessful, Nostalgic is clearly banking on some serious help from Gino’s name recognition. Nostalgic partner Mike Holmgren, (not the football coach with the mustache) told The Business Ledger that according to Nielsen reports, Gino’s is already the eighth most popular frozen pizza brand in Chicago.

We haven’t had the frozen offering quite yet, but we have always been pretty skeptical of the frozen deep-dish pizza in general. If it takes a restaurant 45 minutes to cook the damn thing in their commercial-grade ovens, how long will it take us to cook a completely frozen pie in the good ole Easy Bake? Nostalgic obviously had concerns like this in mind and added a pop-up timer, a la Thanksgiving turkeys, to the pizzas. The little button will rise when the temperature at the pizza’s center reaches 165 degrees.

Last week, Denise O'Neal of the Sun-Times said the frozen Gino’s tastes every bit as good as the in-house variety. All that's left to do now is taste this thing for ourselves, so stay tuned for an official Chicagoist review from your grocer’s freezer section.