Similarly, in Woodridge, Ill., 30 miles southwest of Chicago, another juxtaposition of old world elements and new world technology creates a different type of local attraction - Chicago’s No. 1 selling frozen pizza.
Home Run Inn's bakery-style crusts are par-baked to ensure they are sturdy enough to hold toppings.
It’s not uncommon to see horse-drawn carriages clomping down the streets in Chicago’s famed Gold Coast neighborhood. Like remnants from another era, the horses and their costumed drivers trot alongside sports cars and city buses while their reflections appear in the windows of shiny, high-rise buildings.
Similarly, in Woodridge, Ill., 30 miles southwest of Chicago, another juxtaposition of old world elements and new world technology creates a different type of local attraction - Chicago’s No. 1 selling frozen pizza.
At Home Run Inn Pizza Inc.’s recently expanded 68,000-square-foot pizza processing facility, state-of-the-art machines meet old world flavors and ingredients. Here, frozen pizzas are made according to decades-old family recipes, but are prepared, baked and packaged on processing equipment that’s so cutting-edge, Home Run Inn executives say they have increased production capacity by twice the previous rate and plans are in effect to bump capacity up even more this year.
Mark Carlson is Home Run Inn’s vice president of Frozen Food Operations.
“This machine was the first of its kind,” he says, in reference to a system that pipes fresh homemade sausage over to the pizza processing line - just one example of the plant’s impressive machinery.
Despite modern food-processing amenities, much of what gives Home Run Inn pizzas their appeal - and significant regional market share - is the family business’ commitment to all-natural ingredients and 60-year-old formulas.
For example, the company prepares and uses its own homemade sausage and fresh mozzarella cheese is ground and applied fresh on the line. Home Run Inn prepares its pizza crust according to the same formulation and process first used by Mary Grittani, President and CEO Joe Perrino’s grandmother. Likewise, the company uses tomato puree and herbs to create a fresh sauce each day. Last but not least, it selects all-natural ingredients to complete its 6-inch, 10-inch and 12-inch pizzas.
“We stay true to our product,” says Carlson who is Perrino’s nephew. “You’ll see that many things we do on the production side are not exactly cost efficient, but they ensure the quality of our product and that’s where the priority of our concern is.”
Delivering on demand
There’s no questioning that this commitment to product quality and integrity has helped fuel Home Run Inn’s rise to success.“Two years ago we were operating at capacity at both plants,” Perrino says of the Woodridge facility and a smaller plant in Chicago. “We were shorting customers or switching production runs daily, running seven days a week. So we put on the addition, which is about 20,000 square feet.”
The addition cost $14 million including equipment (everything on the new pizza line is or will be automated) and construction.
Carlson says the company now produces approximately 1 million to 1.5 million pizzas a month for retail and institutional distribution. It likewise processes ingredients for its eight area restaurant locations (where pizzas are assembled on site).
“We go through 80,000 to 120,000 pounds of mozzarella cheese a week and about 15,000 pounds of sauce a day,” Carlson notes.
These statistics are made all the more impressive after considering Home Run Inn’s humble beginnings. Perrino’s father and grandmother started serving pizza at the family’s neighborhood tavern in the 1950s, he explains.
“My dad would make par-baked pizzas for a customer because he ordered them that way. He would take them home and freeze them,” Perrino says. “And then our bartender got the idea to take them to the grocery store. And that was kind of the birth of the frozen pizza business.”
Fast forward to the late 1980s and the frozen pizza business had grown so popular that Home Run Inn built its first USDA processing plant in Chicago, adjacent to its original restaurant location, to satisfy demand. The 10,000 pizzas a day that the company produced there soon proved insufficient. Fueled by demand from the Chicago market, Perrino built the Woodridge facility.
At the time Home Run Inn outsourced delivery and was running into distribution challenges. In 2003, when the company brought delivery in-house through a venture with former Kraft pizza head Jay Williams, Home Run Inn’s frozen pizza saw a big jump in market share.
“We had a major increase rapidly as soon as we got into direct store delivery. Our business increased by 50 percent that first year of it,” Perrino says.
That was four years ago. By 2006, business increased so much that it became clear Home Run Inn needed to expand again.
Making room for growth
“We thought that [older] line would last 15 to 20 years,” Carlson says. “But the business grew so fast we outgrew it.”Still, executives knew that the new expansion was not something that could be rushed, Carlson says.
“We spent time testing all the machinery. We would take our product to the [equipment] manufacturing facilities and cook on their equipment,” he explains. “All of our machinery was hand-picked for our product - not the other way around.”
Highlights of the new line include:
• A hot press that par-bakes fresh dough on both sides of the crust. Par-baking gives crust the heft it needs to keep sauce from soaking through, Carlson says. The dough presses are synched using PLC-driven technology that includes a computer chip sensor. The sensor times a retractable belt, which drops the pressed, par-baked dough on to a conveyor to continue down the line.
• Pizza sauce is prepared from tomato puree and spices in another part of the plant and is piped on to the processing line through a network of pipes that run throughout the building. Sensors align the dough underneath the sauce dispensers where it shoots out in evenly distributed droplets.
• An 85-foot-long bakery-style oven uses conveyors instead of a rotating deck to cook from both sides of the pizza.
• An ammonia-based freezer quickly freezes product within 35 minutes. “We used to use a nitrogen freezer, but we were spending $1.1 million a year on nitrogen because it can’t be recycled,” Carlson says. “This ammonia-based freezer runs on recycled ammonia and will quickly pay for itself with the nitrogen savings.”
All of this is overseen by an extensive network of quality control workers who check for product quality, consistency and safety, Carlson adds.
“We monitor all customer complaints and have lead supervisors who make sure that the complaint level stays under .0025 percent. Currently it is 0.0019 percent,” he says. Carlson attributes the consistent product quality to the plant’s workers.
“We have a great workforce. Many of our people have been with us for six years or more. Some have been with us for 30 years. Our strongest components are our people who really know the product. They are the ones who keep it consistent.”
Still, the new addition did face some start-up challenges.
“We had a rough start,” Perrino says. “But things are running much smoother now.”
Challenges usually are machinery-based, Carlson notes. “When you are working with raw ingredients there isn’t a lot of room for error,” he says.
Not done yet
Today, with the kinks worked out, “the production end of the business is doing very well,” Carlson says. And Home Run Inn isn’t done with the plant improvements. The old line currently is being refurbished and will be moved into the new part of the plant this summer.“We are going to have three times the amount of capacity that we had prior to both expansions,” Perrino says. Moving the new line will cost between $3 million and $3.5 million, Carlson adds. Once complete, the smaller line will be used to process some of the company’s 6-inch and 10-inch pizza varieties.
Despite the fact that Home Run Inn faces the same challenges as the rest of the food industry, including rising commodity costs, the time is right to re-invest in processing facilities, Carlson says.
“Pretty much everything we use is up [in price]. Cheese is up. Corn is up. Flour is up. The choices are, you can cut labor - which we will not do - or come out with new items and new marketing and a new look,” he notes. “We are being creative and coming out with new marketing. Customers are looking for something new.”
To Carlson’s point, the plant expansion isn’t Home Run Inn’s only new initiative this year. The company will launch new packaging and divide its offerings into three categories this September: Classic (Cheese, Cheese and Sausage, etc.), Signature (Plum Tomato, Sausage Supreme, etc.) and Ultra Thin Crust (a new variety that will be offered in Classic flavors on a crispier crust).
“Now is a good time for us to invest. We’re well positioned for it,” Carlson explains. And Home Run Inn’s structure as a family-owned company with old-world values is what allows it to do so.
“I think the biggest difference between a family business and a publicly-traded company is our decisions are not solely based on our profit margin at the end of the day,” Perrino says. “We have to make money but we’re not driven by hitting bottom line numbers to satisfy our stock holders. We are our stock holders.
“We ask the question, ‘What’s right?’ Not ‘how much money are we going to make?’”
