Their clean-label massive mozzarella sticks are a branded menu item at major concert venues like Madison Square Garden and in just over a year have made it into over 3,500 retail doors.
The National Frozen and Refrigerated Foods Association (NFRA) this fall celebrated Big Mozz as the winner of its inaugural Penguin Pitch competition.
Launched in 2015 at Smorgasburg Brooklyn, a large weekly open-air food market, the giant mozzarella sticks were initially an afterthought, said CEO and Founder, Matt Gallira.
“Over the course of that summer so many people came up to the stand and said, ‘I love all the chef-y stuff you guys are doing. But can you just take that cheese and bread it, and deep-fry it?’ Enough people said it that I was like, all right, there's probably something to that,” Gallira said. “I went to the drawing board and said, ‘All right, what's in like a classic, you know, like grandma's meatballs?’ Its breadcrumbs, garlic, parsley, pecorino, Romano salt, and pepper and that's what went on to the outside of mozzarella sticks. We would like we take a loaf of mozzarella, cut it in half. Put them in big hotel pans, bring them out to the market, and fry them to serve. That stand instantly did like three times the sales of the original Big Mozz stand and so, as usual, the customer is right.”
During COVID, Big Mozz taught mozzarella-making classes on Zoom and was selling merch online to pay the bills. (Their old website still bills them as the “worldwide leader in shirts that say Big Mozz”).
“Our manufacturing strategy had been make the product by hand, do that for as long as we could, and then hire a company to do it,” Gallira said.
Big Mozz has since scaled multiple times via co-manufacturers, including onboarding a Midwest processor with 1 million pounds of capacity – a week before the pandemic.
“We finished R&D in like the first week of March of 2020. So if we hadn't done that, then, you know it, it would have been game over,” Gallira said. “We have about 15 million pounds of capacity right now to produce the product and we're really proud. We have a great co-manufacturing partner who is really flexible with line time. I urge new brands to be patient, to be very high-touch with their manufacturers, and also to be, you know, to really kind of live and breathe the values of the brand.”
Foodservice accounts for between 80 and 85% of the company’s total business, Gallira said.
“Foodservice is our superpower, and it's something that we do so in such a different way, and is such a valuable thing to have as part of our total portfolio. And it's really not just about unbranded sales – it's the top of our marketing funnel. So don't write that off if you're a new brand. You don't just have to make the fancy product that's going to go into Whole Foods if you can get it out into the broad line distributors,” he said. “We're driving millions of branded impressions every year through our foodservice business, which is an advantage that we worked very hard to reach.”
Dropping off high-end mozzarella sticks a pallet at a time – something large venues like Yankee Stadium can easily handle – allowed the company to build off of key accounts rather than trying to deliver what Gallira refers to as “the world’s best party field” to hundreds of individual bars and restaurants around the city.
Last summer, Big Mozz began offering their giant mozz sticks for retail sale in the Northeast and have since expanded distribution, including Whole Foods locations nationwide, growing to over 3,500 doors.
“We want to own the label of being the best mozzarella stick that you can buy at retail,” Gallira said.
“It's not something we do often, you know, and I it's such an important exercise to be able to express to
In July, Big Mozz launched Mozz nuggets, a bite-size, shareable version of its classic stick.
Big Mozz, Winner of NFRA’s Penguin Pitch
The NFRA recently celebrated Big Mozz as the winner of its inaugural Penguin Pitch competition.
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“On a manufacturing side, it was, you know, pretty straightforward for us to implement that, but it expanded the number of moments that you could, you know, potentially enjoy the product,” Gallira said.
Big Mozz is debuting two new flavors this fall: Super Ranch is launching at Whole Foods in November and Flamin’ Mozz, a jalapeno-coated mozzarella stick, is stocked in the New York tristate area now.
“I’m definitely filled with excitement and optimism. We're in a crowded category; frozen will never be easy in terms of a retail space to play in, but we're excited for the challenge,” Gallira said. “What is succeeding in frozen is premium. There's more brand discovery happening in frozen than there ever has been. We're a premium corner of a subset of frozen handhelds and appetizers. We make a premium mozzarella stick – and that's it – but I would love to see more premium branded items start to appear in the frozen set because a rising tide lifts all boats.”
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