By Brian Hernandez
Home Run Inn (HRI) is giving its brick-and-mortar restaurant customers something to remember it by: another pizza, frozen, for later.
On November 4, the Chicago institution announced its first frozen pan pizza and a promotion designed to get it into customers’ freezers. Every Friday in November, an extra-large cheese or sausage pizza purchased for dine-in or carryout comes with one free frozen pan pizza per order.
Major League had Charlie Sheen’s “Wild Thing” coming out of the bullpen. Home Run Inn’s relief comes out of the freezer.
Related: Anthony Mangieri: How I Broke into the Frozen Pizza Business
The 9” pan pizzas come in five varieties: Cheese, Sausage, Sausage Pepperoni, Meat Lovers and Pepperoni. They’re already available at Chicagoland Jewel stores and Tony’s Fresh Market locations, expanding the brand’s frozen lineup with a thicker crust.
In the announcement, CEO and fourth-generation family member Dan Costello said the product gives customers “another delicious way to enjoy the Home Run Inn flavor they know and love.” The restaurant promotion, meanwhile, gives existing customers an opportunity to test that proposition at home.
That’s the interesting part for operators. Home Run Inn is putting a new retail product into the hands of someone who already likes its restaurant pizza enough to buy an extra-large. The company gets to introduce another way to enjoy the brand while the customer is having a good experience with it.
Home Run Inn has some familiar company in that freezer aisle. Katie Lee of Katie’s Pizza & Pasta Osteria has taken her handmade frozen pizzas into Target stores nationwide. On a smaller scale, Tony Gemignani of Tony’s Pizza Napoletana offers frozen pies for shipping. Both give customers a way to enjoy a familiar favorite long after they’ve moved beyond delivery range.
Related: How Katie Lee ‘Did the Impossible’: 400,000 Handmade Pizzas in 96 Days for Target Stores Nationwide
A change of address doesn’t erase a craving or the memories attached to it. It’s a little Moneyball thinking: Find a different way to get your brand on base without building another ballpark.
On a decidedly different culinary level, I was ridiculously excited when I could get White Castle sliders from the freezer aisle. Add my own pickle, and I had a little taste of something I’d been missing after my relocation south. I’m sorry, Krystal just ain’t cutting it, but I digress. And that’s part of the opportunity here: Your restaurant may be local, but your customers don’t always stay that way. Give them a way to take that connection with them, and moving away doesn’t have to mean saying goodbye to your pizza.
As HRI’s chief revenue officer Nick Perrino told PMQ’s Tracy Morin in a September interview, “The restaurants are the soul of our brand, and the frozen pizzas are the engine.” That relationship gives both sides something useful. Restaurants let customers experience the brand firsthand, while frozen products can follow them into meals the restaurants might otherwise miss. After all, the customer who loves your dining room still has evenings when leaving the couch feels like playing a double header.
You know this customer: They order regularly, recommend you to friends and still keep somebody else’s frozen pizza at home. To borrow The Sandlot’s timeless complaint: “You’re killing me, Smalls!” But they might never have considered delivery that night in the first place. Sometimes you just want something already on hand. Home Run Inn’s giveaway puts its brand in position for that meal, too, raising a useful question: How many dinners could you sell beyond the ones customers order hot?
Frozen pizza has its own sales challenges. Food Business News reported $7.29 billion in sales for the 52 weeks ending September 6, down 1.9% from the previous year, with unit sales down 2%. Home Run Inn’s giveaway puts a new product into customers’ hands while other manufacturers are working to generate demand.
Smaller appetites are also influencing product development. Discussing GLP-1 users with Baking Business, Palermo’s chief product innovation officer Nick Fallucca said, “Everything has to count, which favors premium, high-satisfaction products over volume plays.”
Palermo’s is now scouting Roman-style pinsa as a prospect to watch, with an airy crust, high hydration and long fermentation rounding out its stats.
For independents, frozen or take-and-bake pies offer another purchase between restaurant visits—or after customers move away. Producing them adds packaging, labor and cold-storage costs, while the finished pizza has to perform in a customer’s home oven. The opportunity extends the brand’s reach, along with its responsibility for what comes out of that oven. In other words, let the freezer beware. Adding frozen pizza to your lineup shouldn’t mean sacrificing the quality that got you to the big leagues. If it disappoints in a customer’s oven, that promising new prospect could get your whole brand benched. Go, sports balls!
Home Run Inn’s November promotion is a practical attempt to reach customers twice through one restaurant purchase. Whether those samples produce future retail sales remains to be seen, but the brand has given its customers an easy first try.
Independent pizzerias can ask which version of that opportunity suits their business. Tomorrow’s dinner is always right around the corner, and somebody is going to sell it.
Brian Hernandez is PMQ’s associate editor and coordinator of PMQ’s U.S. Pizza Team.
