Today I came across separate items from two pizza companies relating to freezers. Since the journalistic tradition is that one is a fluke but two is a trend, I’m going to write about them both.
The first comes from Papa Murphy’s, which is a chain of “take-and-bake” pizza shops – that is, they assemble the pie to your specs but you bake it, at home. They’re on a crusade to, as they put it, “Liberate Consumers from Last Resort Pizza,” by which they mean frozen pizza. Their promotion, for National Pizza Month (October), invites consumers to find the oldest “frozen slabs of sadness” in their freezers and tweet pictures of their expiration dates. This will enter them in a sweepstakes, from which three lucky winners will get a year’s supply of Papa Murphy’s, a new freezer and a gift card for food to fill it – presumably not pizza. (Details for the contest, which ends Oct. 8, can be found here.)
The second is from Caulipower, one of the first companies to make cauliflower-crust pizza. For them, giving away freezers is piker stuff. They’re out to remake the American refrigerator.
Caulipower commissioned a poll purporting to show that “77% of Americans want to turn the traditional fridge-freezer on its head.” In other words, they want most of their fridge to be a freezer – or, as the company’s release calls it, a “freezerator.” This impulse supposedly comes from stocking up on frozen foods during the pandemic.
It doesn’t seem logical that anyone would want to sacrifice refrigerated space for frozen, but no matter: Caulipower is using this as the basis for its own giveaway. It’s soliciting designs for “freezerators” from consumers, which it promises to put “in front of the top kitchen appliance manufacturers.” I’m not sure that will go anywhere, but no matter: the design that Caulipower likes best will earn its creator a year’s supply of its products.
These are just a couple of promotional stunts, but I can’t get them out of my head. “Frozen Slab of Sadness” sounds like the title of a Lifetime movie:
Jenna is trying to enter a pizza in her freezer into an oldest-frozen-pizza contest, but when she wipes away the frost covering the expiration date, it reveals, tucked into the cellophane, a note from her long-lost true love. After all these years, is his love as frostbitten as the pizza? Should Jenna continue her relationship with Fred, the brilliant inventor of the freezerator?
OK, it needs work. But I need something to take my mind off last night’s Presidential debate.
Pan Demetrakakes is a Senior Editor for Food Processing and has been a business journalist since 1992, mostly covering various aspects of the food production and supply chain, including processing, packaging, distribution and retailing. Learn more about him or contact him
