The Famous Italian-American Brand That Makes High-Quality Frozen Pizza

Frozen pizza is a $24.3 billion industry (via Grand View Research), with dozens of brands saturating the marketplace. As a result, many pizza lovers typically have a favorite brand. But there's one frozen pizza brand that's relatively new to the space and yet deserves your consideration. Italian American brand Rao's, the famous tomato sauce maker, began making frozen pizzas in 2022. The brand has a 130-year history in the food business, beginning in 1896 at its New York City East Harlem restaurant of the same name.The Rao family comes from Southern Italy, and the restaurant eventually became known for its Southern Italian homestyle cooking in the 1970s, thanks to one of the owners' wives, Anna Pellegrino Rao.

Rao's offers six different frozen pizzas with a brick-oven style crust: five cheese, uncured pepperoni, fire-roasted vegetable, Italian sausage arrabbiata, meat trio, and supreme. Its pizzas have some of the highest quality ingredients of any frozen pizza brand, with no real additives to speak of besides anti-caking agents. That dedication to whole food ingredients started when the company began bottling its red sauce back in 1992. Frank Pellegrino Sr., one of the owners of Rao's, refused to include water, sugar, starches, tomato paste, fillers, or colorings in their sauce. The brand also notably sources the majority of its veggies and meats from La Regina Atlantica in Georgia, and its tomatoes and olive oil are imported directly from Italy.

Interestingly, despite Rao's foray into frozen pizza, none of its three restaurant locations actually offer pizza. Nevertheless, the brand still manages to pull off a decent pizza, although reviews are mixed on some offerings, especially at the price point. The Italian Sausage Arrabbiata is the highest-rated pizza according to online reviews. The mix of flavors, including the spicy version of Rao's tomato sauce, received top marks. On the other hand, the five cheese and pepperoni pizzas seem to suffer from too much sauce or crust, in addition to bland-tasting cheese.

But pizza preference is personal, and whether you'll like Rao's frozen pizza comes down to your taste buds. You can find the brand's pizza at Target and major grocery stores like Whole Foods and Kroger. The suggested retail price for a single pizza is $12.99, but the range is more like $10 to $15, depending on the store. The cheese and pepperoni pizzas are the most widely available types, which tracks with the most popular pizza toppings.

Because Rao's frozen pizza has a pre-cooked brick oven-style crust, it actually has brick oven instructions as well as conventional oven instructions on the box. Obviously, cooking pizza in a brick oven will taste closer to authentic restaurant-style pizza, but if you're not bougie, you can cook yours in a regular oven. Just add a little Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese and some fresh parsley or basil for a little touch of Italian restaurant-quality finishing.