If you’re like us, you love the show How It’s Made on the Discovery Channel. Now in its 30th season, the show has helped television viewers and consumers around the world to understand just how much work goes into the manufacturing process of seemingly mundane, everyday items.
One of these episodes discussed the manufacturing of frozen pizzas, a product enjoyed by millions of Americans each day. With more than 350 million tons of frozen pizzas sold each year, Americans enjoy over 2 billion slices of frozen pizza annually—with the average family eating frozen pizza 30 times per year, once every 12 days.
The Rise of Frozen Pizzas
While the concept of pizza has been around for millennia, pizza can trace its American roots to the wave of Italian immigration in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Considered to be a staple for Italian Americans in factory towns, the food slowly grew in communities such as New York, St. Louis, and Chicago. However, it wasn’t until the end of World War II until the demand for pizzas skyrocketed beyond that of the local pizzeria.
Fueled by modern flash-freezing techniques and the rise of the home freezer, the frozen pizza became a reality in the 1950s and 60s, before rising crust turned the frozen pizza market into the multibillion industry that exists today.
How It’s Made: Frozen Pizzas
How It’s Made explored the process in which frozen pizzas were made during their 2006-2007 season, discussing nearly every step in the manufacturing process—from dough to toppings to packaging.
What How It’s Made is Missing: The Cheese Melter
The following video segment explores some of the processes involved in frozen pizza manufacturing. However, the video fails to acknowledge an important piece of equipment. This piece of equipment is critical to quality assurance, customer satisfaction, and product consistency that comes in the manufacturing process.
Why Cheese Melters Are so Important in the Pizza Manufacturing Process
Pizza making is an art, pizza manufacturing is an art and a science. Each pizza needs to meet quality standards in weight, size, shape, and topping distribution before it reaches the consumer, and any deviation from perfect can result in complaints and lost business.
Knowing this, the frozen pizza supply chain is one that requires a lot of effort, and manufacturers need to ensure the product can handle its journey from the factory to the warehouse to the store to the consumer.
To ensure each product can handle the jostling that comes during the supply chain, frozen pizza manufacturers rely on infrared cheese melters. These melters are designed to keep toppings and cheese in place during shipping, stocking, and transportation, ensuring that customers are satisfied with the final product.
Cheese Melters from The CMM Group
The CMM Group has completed projects for global, national, regional, and local manufacturers and can provide solutions for multiple points of the food manufacturing process. We offer complete baking, production, and pollution control solutions to food manufacturers of all sizes, and can also design custom products to fit into your current processes, regardless of the original equipment manufacturer (OEM).
The CMM Guide to Industrial Cheese Melters
If you are looking to learn more about the path to purchase for this important piece of equipment, we are pleased to announce a new guide on the benefits, use cases, and path to purchase for cheese melters. Preview this guide below and click here to download the entire guide to selecting, installing, and using a cheese melter.
