Wade's World

Why Totino’s Needs 25 Ways to Make Pizza Rolls

As we all know, the supply chain issues due to the COVID-19 pandemic have taken a huge toll on many food businesses. One of them being General Mills, who makes Totino’s Pizza Rolls. During the pandemic, these snacks where flying off the shelves since the population was looking for something easy to make that would satisfy their needs. To make a Totino’s Pizza Roll, it takes 21 ingredients. These ingredients were easy to obtain before the pandemic because the packaged food industry was a pretty stable market. Now, that there are certain supply chain issues, it is hard to get certain ingredients for these pizza rolls, resulting in shortages in many stores. When General Mills would finally receive more of 1 ingredient, they would almost be out of another ingredient, so there were always set backs. They needed to find a solution to keep up with the increasing demand, so that they were bringing in as much money as possible.

General Mills’ solution is to make 25 different recipes, all resulting in a pizza roll. The recipes aren’t changing drastically, only fiddling with certain starches and sweeteners within the product. Ingredion, a company that makes sweeteners and starches used by large food companies, had their 500 scientists across 26 labs working on new variations of pizza rolls. Beth Tormey, a vice president and general manager of systems and ingredient solutions at Ingredion, mentions that it’s not as easy as it sounds. “It has to meet parameters of texture and taste so that consumers like it, but it also has to fit into the regulatory box and the nutrition box. It all sounds simple from a distance, but it’s not.”

General Mills was able to come to come up with 25 variations of the pizza roll and they are now stocked back up in freezer sections again. General Mills learned a lot. They now have many different suppliers for each ingredient and are now keeping more of each ingredient on hand.

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