Wisconsin Eats More Frozen Pizza Than Any Other State In America
It's called the Badger State, but maybe it should be called the Frozen Pizza State. Wisconsinites are eating so much frozen pizza that Wisconsin has become the largest per capita frozen pizza consumer in the U.S.
That's according to Nestle product developer Chris Zelch, who confirmed Wisconsin's pizza primacy to the Appleton Post-Crescent and told the paper that frozen pizza sales continue to rise about 2 percent every year in the state. Zelch attributes this massive statewide consumption to Wisconsin's large population of people of Norwegian descent, since Norway is actually the country that eats the most frozen pizza in the world.
Northern Wisconsin news channel WJFW checked to see if Wisconsin's love for frozen pizza played out at the local level. Sure enough, John Ackman, the dairy and frozen foods manager at a regional Wisconsin supermarket, told the station that 40 percent of the sales in his department are from frozen pizza, and that his store alone sells more than 200 flavors of the stuff.
The eastern part of the state is directly north of Chicago, but they're not just having Lou Malnati's frozen and sent up the lakeshore. No, people in Wisconsin are eating every frozen pizza brand out there, including Wisconsin-based brands like DiGiorno, Tombstone, Jack's and Palermo's.
Apparently, Wisconsinites do not favor one kind of topping over the other, either. They are equal opportunity consumers when it comes to frozen pizza. "You can get anything from a Buffalo chicken, to chicken and wild rice, to breakfast pizza," Ackman told WJFW. "I mean, you name it."
Whether they're picky about toppings or not, we bet that some Wisconsinites would have a lot of opinions about our ranking of the best frozen pizza brands.