We now want quality from pizza, whether it’s frozen pizza, home-made or restaurant-bought pizza.
A pizza boom has been raging in Finland for a couple of years now, which is also reflected in the sales data of pizza-making products. You want to make a high-quality pizza yourself, but quality is also needed from ready-made pizzas.
– Customers’ needs vary. Sometimes you want to make a premium pizza yourself from scratch and sometimes you want to enjoy it quickly, so ready-made pizzas are also interesting, says Kesko’s own brand sales director Created by the wind.
So consumers are increasingly interested in high-quality ingredients, whether it’s home-made or frozen pizza. Luoma believes that quality will be a strong word in the future as well.
– Premium pizzas have their own customer base, which, as pizza culture develops, will increase its share in the future.
Apetit also believes in the continuity of the pizza boom, which renewed the entire baking side of its Pudasjärvi factory last summer and the line by acquiring, among other things, a new pizza oven and Italian pizza stones. At the same time, the entire pizza recipe was changed. The pizzas of the new Superior series are made with freshly baked dough.
– Frozen pizzas have been on the rise in Finland for years and have grown in popularity. We analyzed the market and came to the conclusion that there is certainly a demand for domestic, high-quality frozen pizza, says Apetit’s pizzas product group manager, brand and product group manager responsible for pizzas Mari Pallonen.
According to Pallonen, sales of the renewed pizzas have started well and consumers have mostly received positive feedback on the reform.
In the freezers of the stores, we will soon see other reforms regarding premium pizzas, because the packaging look of the Pirkka Parhaat stone oven pizzas, which have been on sale since 2019, is also just about to change.
Apetit’s new Opera Special has quickly become a consumer favorite. Apetite
Meat is interesting in pizza
In Apetit’s renewed frozen pizza series, one flavor combination has become by far the most popular. It’s the Opera Special with ham, tuna and pepperoni.
– This is a flavor combination familiar to Finns from pizzerias all over Finland. We did a lot of background work when we were thinking about flavor combinations, and we also wanted to invest in domesticity. The percentage of Finnish people in Opera Special is more than one percent, says Mari Pallonen.
Meat fillings are also sold in pizzerias. The most popular toppings of the Kotipizza chain are ham, pineapple, blue cheese and grilled chicken. During the last year, the relative popularity of extra cheese, kebab meat and pepperoni sausage has increased the most.
– The sales of vegetable and fish fillings are higher in big cities, while in Ostrobothnia, for example, the popularity of minced meat sauce is stable and even compared to the rest of the country. Grilled chicken, on the other hand, has been particularly popular in Eastern Finland, says Kotipizza’s business manager Revenge Talala.
The most popular topping for home pizza is ham. Tiina Somerpuro
Take advantage of the cheese chives and ham
New Year’s Day is traditionally a day when pizza is eaten in many Finnish homes. Many people order pizza at home from a restaurant, but if there are still the last leftovers of Christmas food in the fridge, you should make the pizza yourself.
Kotipizzauni Oon’s pizza ambassador, pizza author known as Slicemonger and restaurateur of Tampere’s Slicemonger restaurant Jukka Salminen advises in the bulletin how to make a pizza from the leftovers of Christmas dishes – and a high-quality one.
– Ham makes a great pizza when you add leftover cheeses from the cheese board, and after baking, for example, cranberry or fig jam. My favorites on Christmas pizza are, among other things, various blue cheeses.
Salminen says that he himself prefers a rich fish table at Christmas.
– That’s why I like fish pizza, on which you can put leftover salmon from the Christmas table, dill and various cheeses. If roe is left over, you can add it to the fish pizza after baking, he advises and reminds that you should follow the same rule for Christmas waste pizza as for making a good pizza in general: less is more.
So it’s not a good idea to put everything on the Christmas waste pizza, but the best result comes when you choose two to three elements as toppings that go well together anyway.