https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcndywpVSq8
Go anywhere around the world and you can find food with a bready outer package filled with something tasty:
pasties, dumplings, empanadas, samosas, bao buns, potstickers, hot pockets, burritos, Little Debbie’s hand pies, calzone, stromboli…
 
Today, We are going to talk about a very specific one:  The Totino’s Pizza Roll.
 
It all started in the small town of Aurora, MN on the Iron Range in Northern Minnesota.  Luigino “Jeno” Francesco Paulucci was born July 5th, 1918 to Italian emigrants Ettore, who worked in the iron mines and sold home-made wine, and Michelina, who sold home-made pasta sauce. Ettore suffered an injury which precluded him working the mines.
Struggling to make ends meet the family, instead, opened a small grocery store in Hibbing, MN (You know who else was from Hibbing? A couple of singers, a few politicians, and a LOT of hockey players).  Jeno worked in his parents grocery store until he got a job selling grocery items as a travelling salesman.
 
In 1946, Jeno founded Chun King in a Quonset hut in Grand Rapids, MN (you know who else was from Grand Rapids? A couple of actors, a few politicians, and a LOT of hockey players.).  He set up a hydroponic garden where he grew bean sprouts that he sold to Chinese restaurants around northern Minnesoda.
Jeno noticed that most grocery stores had few Asian products on their shelves.  He also found most Chinese food to be bland, so he added his familiar Italian spices (along with his bean sprouts) to Chop Suey.  He and his mother canned it and sold it locally and eventually nationally. 
Jeno moved operations to Duluth, MN in 1954. The company thrived. Chun King Express trucks could be found distributing canned and frozen products nationwide.
In the late 1960s Paulucci sold the company to R.J. Reynolds for $63 million. But he kept the egg roll machines. 
“Only in America would it be possible for a man with a name like Jeno Francesco Paulucci, son of poor Italian immigrant, to get rich selling Chinese food in a Scandanavian region.”– Jeno Paulucci
 
He started Jeno’s shortly after.  He needed a use for those egg roll machines.  So he asked Beatrice (Luoma) Ojakangas, by coincidence the older sister of the engineer who had designed the egg roll machines for Chun King, to develop some fillings to go in his egg roll wrappers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJuNcEA1nKQ
Notice Bea’s poker face at the end? I don’t think she was impressed. 
In 1985, Paulucci sold his Jeno’s Pizza Rolls brand to Pillsbury for $135 million. The Jeno’s line of pizza rolls was rebranded as Totino’s in 1993.  Totino’s continues to dominate the pizza roll market.  I have no idea why.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ef-eMquH3I
 
Totino’s pizza rolls taste like little pillows of molten despair with notes of child neglect. Perhaps my tastes have changed as I’ve grown older (actually I know they have).  Or maybe the quality has gone down. 
Totino’s Pizza Rolls:  1.2/5 


Post log:
  • Some people will quibble and say that the “pepperoni roll” was first sold by Giuseppe “Joseph” Argiro at the Country Club Bakery in Fairmont, West Virginia, in 1927. While earlier than the Jeno’s pizza roll, it looks more like a calzone to me.
  • Jeno’s son, Mick, co-founded a string of successful restaurants including Grandma’s (excellent Steak Cheese French sandwich) which is less than a block away from the Paulucci Building.
  • Bea Ojakangas went on to write more than 30 cook books, opened a successful restaurant, cooked with Julia Child and Martha Stewart, won a James Beard Award, and still appears on local television.
  • Jeno Paulucci died in 2011 at the age of 93. He started over 70 companies.