The nation’s fourth-largest branded frozen pizza manufacturer, led by President Chad Schultz, produces more than 60 million pizzas annually.
Photograph by Shane Van Boxtel, Image Studios
Three giant silos holding a combined 250,000 pounds of flour scrape the ceiling of the bakery at Bernatello’s Foods in Kaukauna.
As the nation’s fourth-largest branded frozen pizza manufacturer, Bernatello’s goes through at least 50,000 pounds of flour a day making crusts — the first leg on a pizza’s journey to completion. The company produces more than 60 million pizzas annually under a brand portfolio including frozen aisle favorites Brew Pub Lotzza Motzza, Bellatoria, Orv’s, Roma and Pizza Corner.
Today the line is running crusts for the company’s newly-launched Brew Pub Patriot Pizza — a super premium thin crust pie that supports the nonprofit Tunnel to Towers Foundation — and R&D Manager Rob DeGroot is ready to put the crust to the test.
He pulls a completed crust off the line and rips it open, examining its “gumline” — the thin ribbon of unbaked dough in the center.
“You can never bake all the moisture out of it,” says DeGroot, who became head of R&D after 20 years as plant manager. “There’s always a little higher moisture in the middle of the crust, but this doesn’t look like there’s too much and that’s the goal.” While the crust lays the all-important pizza foundation, DeGroot believes that the key to a superior pizza is the sauce.
“Personally, I’m a sauce person,” he says. “If the sauce isn’t right, I don’t care about anything else.”
But the most important part of a pizza really depends on who you ask. While DeGroot is a staunch believer in sauce, some argue that crust is king. Others will say if the toppings are unbalanced — game over.
If you ask President Chad Schultz, the real secret ingredient at Bernatello’s is a sense of purpose that’s baked into every layer of the company. “Giving back is very important to us,” Schultz says. “Pizza is secondary to the people and our culture and who we really are.”
A slice of Wisconsin history
Wisconsin proudly claims itself as the “Frozen Pizza Capital of the World,” consuming more frozen pizza than any other state on a per capita basis. Major brands such as Jack’s, Tombstone and Palermo’s all started in the Dairy State.
Sports teams even nod to our love of the food. In February, the Wisconsin Timber Rattlers unveiled a new alternate identity — the Wisconsin Frozen Pizzas. The Frozen Pizzas will take the Neuroscience Group Field for the first time July 12 and, yes, there will be a frozen pizza bobblehead.
This tribute on the ballfield reflects the region’s deep roots in the frozen pizza industry, where Bernatello’s has been a leader for more than 40 years.
“We’re the number four producer of branded pizza nationally [and] we’re only in 20% of the market,” Schultz says. “So we’re very strong where we play in the Upper Midwest, which we call the ‘Pizza Belt.’ It’s where frozen pizza came to life.”
The Midwest “Pizza Belt” unofficially refers to the states where household penetration of frozen pies is the greatest per capita, Schultz explains. That includes Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri, Illinois and Michigan.
“It’s really developed because of the quality of our pizzas and even our competitors. It really drove the category and the competition,” Schultz says.
Like many Midwest-based pizza brands, Bernatello’s got its start in a tavern.
Bernard “Bud” Rudolph Garthe created Bud’s Pizza in the 1970s, serving his famous pies to customers at Bernie’s Bar and Restaurant in Annandale, Minnesota. In 1982, former CEO and now chairman Bill Ramsay bought a 50% share in Bud’s and changed its name to Bernatello’s, an Italian-inspired homage to its founder. Three years later, the company’s first automated production facility was built in Maple Lake, Minnesota and still produces specialty products today.
Since then, Bernatello’s has expanded its capacity, brand portfolio and Wisconsin footprint through key acquisitions, including Eau Claire’s Dadco Foods in 2000. The Dadco acquisition brought Bernatello’s not only the value brand Roma Pizza and the services of Schultz, who was Dadco’s general manager at the time, but it also brought a new distribution system.
Schultz, who has been in the Wisconsin pizza industry since the late ’80s, says Dadco offered a needed alternative to Bernatello’s warehouse distribution model that required shipping products to retailers’ central distribution centers and wholesalers where they were stored until delivery to individual stores.
Two advantages of direct store delivery (DSD) are it allows for faster replenishment and ensures rotation with hands in the case and leads to fresher products, Schultz says. For example, the first production run of the new Brew Pub Patriot Pizza was on a Tuesday. By Friday, pictures of the product on the store shelves were popping up online.
“We want to get the pizzas out there as fresh as we can. We look at frozen pizza as a perishable product, almost like produce,” he says. “If they’re sitting on the shelf for a period of time, they definitely degrade.”
Retail grocers are the biggest part of Bernatello’s business, but consumers will find its brands in convenience stores, taverns and at venues such at Green Bay’s Resch Center and Lambeau Field — Brew Pub Pizzas are the official pizza of the Green Bay Packers and the Wisconsin Badgers.
But as the industry continues to evolve, so will the distribution model for Bernatello’s. Ironically, the pizza industry is seeing a resurgence of warehouse distribution as more small retailers get acquired by their larger competitors, which often demand warehouse delivery to maintain efficiencies.
To stay competitive in a consolidating retail landscape, Bernatello’s is adapting its approach by reexamining its history with warehouse delivery while preserving the core strengths that set it apart.
“[DSD] is a relationship business. It’s been a competitive advantage for us,” Schultz says. “It’s an extremely expensive, complex system to run, but it’s definitely a value-added for us.”
Rising to the top
While its roots are deep in tavern culture, today Bernatello’s is an industry leader driving super premium pizza market growth.
Schultz says one of the greatest innovations at Bernatello’s has been elevating the humble frozen pizza through its premium brand Bellatoria and super premium brand Brew Pub. Bellatoria, which launched in 2007, was the company’s first product line in the premium frozen pizza category.
“Frozen pizza had kind of a bad image, especially 30 to 40 years ago,” Schultz says. “Today I’d put Bellatoria or Brew Pub against any fresh industry product. I think they deliver at the same level or, in some cases, better.”
Frozen pizzas are divided into five pricing tiers (value, mainstream, premium, super premium and ultra premium) based on ingredients, branding, size and crust type. The super premium tier is driving the most growth, with an 18.4% increase in sales dollars over the last year, according to Nielsen data.
When the company acquired Kaukauna’s Five Star Foods in 2010, it brought not only the mainstream Orv’s brand to its portfolio, but more significantly the trademark for Lotzza Motzza, which Bernatello’s has transformed into a $100 million super premium brand that has paved the way for much of the company’s growth.
“The Brew Pub product launched in 2012 and it was just growing and growing. It’s the number one-selling pizza in Wisconsin and Minnesota,” DeGroot says. “That product alone justified our 2018 facility expansion.”
Brew Pub and Bellatoria are among the top eight fastest-selling frozen pizza brands relative to their distribution. Brew Pub is No. 2, just behind Jack’s, when you look at how much it sells per point of All Commodity Volume (ACV); Bellatoria is No. 8.
In other words, Bernatello’s brands are punching above their weight — they may not be in every store, but where they are, they sell like crazy. Schultz says this means there is ample untapped potential for these brands to grow outside their home turf.
“You look at other places, like on the East Coast where frozen pizza has a very small market share. Grocery stores don’t designate hardly any space to frozen pizza in a lot of those geographic areas,” Schultz says. “To me, it’s a great opportunity for retailers, but they’re totally underdeveloped markets in comparison with the ‘Pizza Belt.’”
Brew Pub is the 12th best-selling frozen pizza brand in the U.S. across all retail channels, growing sales by 8% year over year. Bellatoria is ranked 16th, with 8.4% year-over-year growth with less than 20% ACV distribution nationally. Both have grown by about $5.8 million apiece in new sales over the past year.
It’s a sign of real momentum, as well as a point of pride for employees like Corporate Engineering Manager Ryan Jones, who says he and his colleagues always make a stop in the grocery store pizza aisle, regardless of what’s on the menu.
“It’s kind of funny. Even if you’re not gonna pick up a pizza, you still go down the aisle to see where [competitors] are at and how they’re doing things and where their pricing is at,” Jones says. “Everybody here is very passionate and very proud to be Bernatello’s employees … You work with this product all day long, so it’s cool to see it in the grocery store.”
Pieces of the pie
Under second-generation CEO Dave Ramsay, Bill’s son, Bernatello’s has invested heavily in production capacity to support its growth from a $20 million company to $250 million. Acquiring the Kaukauna facility drove brand growth, but it was also a turning point from a manufacturing perspective, Schultz says.
“That really elevated us. We wouldn’t be able to compete with [national competitors] Schwan’s or Nestlé if we didn’t drive low-cost manufacturing through automation and capital investment,” Schultz says. “That’s really what’s leveled our playing field a lot with them.”
In 2018, the company completed a 30,000-square-foot, $50 million expansion of a high-speed double pizza topping line, turning the once-modest Kaukauna facility into an operation capable of producing more than 140,000 pizzas per day.
“We made about 30,000 pizzas a day on the old line, so this was quite an upgrade,” DeGroot says.
The Kaukauna facility bakery also underwent a significant expansion in 2021.
“It was a very large project with the goal to increase crust capacity,” Jones says. “We were putting in new equipment and moving existing equipment. We relocated one of our bakery lines in nine days and doubled capacity when we started it up.”
In response to booming demand post-COVID, in 2023 the company acquired a third facility, Festive Foods in Waupaca, allowing for scalable production with room to grow over the next five to seven years.
This production flexibility of this facility is critical as Bernatello’s innovates with new formats and flavors to meet emerging consumer trends. In response to the growing demand for gluten-free food options, last year Bernatello’s added two new Bellatoria gluten-free offerings to its existing lineup. Sales of Bellatoria’s gluten-free pizzas grew by 58.5% across total U.S. retail outlets in the past year — that’s nearly nine times faster than the overall gluten-free segment growth rate.
The recently launched Brew Pub Pizza Bowls are a crustless pizza for consumers seeking a higher-protein option and have been successfully positioned as both a frozen pizza and a single-serve frozen entree.
“Better-for-you is where everything is going, especially with the younger crowd,” Schultz says. “We’ve got some really new, exciting, innovative brands that are going to be coming to market in the near future.”
Pizza with purpose
Community involvement is a priority at Bernatello’s, which focuses its charitable efforts on three key areas — supporting military and first responders, helping at-risk youth and addressing food insecurity. Many of these causes indirectly address mental health as well, Schultz says.
“There’s such a need for mental health services, whether in our youth or military and first responders, so being able to [support] organizations like Tunnels to Towers and Rawhide, that’s what’s important to us,” he says.
A portion of sales of the new Brew Pub Patriot Pizza is supporting the Tunnel to Towers Foundation, which was founded in tribute to New York Fire Department firefighter Stephen Siller, who was killed during the September 11 attacks. The nationwide foundation provides mortgage-free homes to Gold Star and fallen first responder families with young children, and it also builds custom-designed homes for injured veterans and first responders.
“I’ve got two boys in the military right now and a long line of family military members, so the cause is near and dear to my heart — but it is to the company, too,” Schultz says.
Bernatello’s has set the ambitious goal of donating $1 million within a year of Patriot Pizza’s launch. The thin crust pie, which comes in cleverly named varieties like “Hail to the Cheese” and “Yankee Noodle” macaroni and bacon, was designed to appeal to a national consumer to work in conjunction with Tunnel to Towers’ nationwide footprint.
“Personally, I think Patriot might be our best pizza yet,” Schultz says. “It’s more of a balanced product that can play nationally because we actually get complaints outside of the Upper Midwest that the Lotzza Motzza has too much cheese, if you can believe that.”
In support of one of the company’s other key focuses — at-risk youth — Schultz joined the board of Rawhide Youth Services in 2021.
Serving more than 2,000 youth each year, Rawhide provides multiple programs including a residential program and counseling services for youth battling depression, anxiety, trauma and abuse.
Rawhide’s Chief Growth Officer Heather Stern says Bernatello’s regularly runs promotions where $1 from each Brew Pub pizza sale benefits the nonprofit. The most recent program last fall, in partnership with Festival Foods, brought in more than $51,000.
Bernatello’s was an anchor of Rawhide’s 2022 capital campaign, donating $250,000 as one of its lead sponsors. The money raised allowed the organization to build a new youth home for boys and upgrade its cafe with a new state-of-the-art kitchen for hosting culinary classes and fish fry fundraisers.
“We do very large fish fries in the summer, which are fundraising events for us — but they also give our kids an opportunity to learn life skills and connect with the public,” Stern says. “It’s a really unique and special opportunity that we have for our kids that live here on our campus, and Bernatello’s has been a huge part of making that happen.”
But Stern says the partnership extends beyond the dollars donated.
“Our missions, our values, our goals are really aligned and in harmony,” she says. “Their focus is not just giving money, but actually coming in and connecting with our boys.”
Stern says the Bernatello’s team regularly comes to the Rawhide campus in New London to host pizza parties, organize kickball games and invest time in the youth.
“They have been the true example of a partner,” Stern says. “We’ve built trust and respect between the two organizations, but we’ve also built beautiful connections and friendships between our staff and the Bernatello’s team. It’s just been a really beautiful partnership.”
What began as a corporate partnership has grown into something far more meaningful — an ongoing exchange of passion, purpose and, of course, pizza.
“But it’s so much more than pizza,” Stern argues. “It’s really about making a difference and making connections, and Bernatello’s really is true to that.”
