Rose Totino is a rarity amongst her pizzaiola contemporaries in that she achieved recognition for her achievements and commercial success during her lifetime. Born Rosenella Winifred Cruciani in 1915 (the same year as Alice Mae Redmond) to Italian immigrants in Minneapolis, MN, Rose was the third of seven children who grew up eating a small “Italian pie made with sausage, cheese and a variety of sauces,” (Minnesota Inventors). She began working at age 16 after dropping out of school to provide supplemental income for her family by cleaning house until she married Jim Totino at age 19. Jim was a baker by trade and a decade into their marriage, the couple decided to open a restaurant together. 

Pizza was hardly the household name that it is today; in the 1940s it was just establishing a foothold in markets like the New York metro area, New Haven, Boston, and Chicago. Rose first encountered a pizzeria as a viable business model on a trip to visit her aunt in Pennsylvania in 1942. 

In 1951 when Rose and Jim first opened the doors at Totino’s Italian Kitchen, they never could have dreamed that over the next several decades they would build a frozen pizza empire. In fact, they had a difficult time convincing the bank to loan them the $1,500 they needed for startup cash until Rose baked the banker his first ever pizza. The business started as a small take-out establishment and grew into a sit-down restaurant where Rose and Jim cranked out 500 pies a day as word got out in the Minneapolis community about this delicious new thing called pizza. The couple worked together side-by-side with Jim handling the oven and Rose the rest.

With the booming success of their restaurant, Rose and Jim wanted to give the people more ways to enjoy their food, opening up Totino’s Finer Foods in 1962 so that families could take-and-bake frozen pizzas at the kitchen table. Totino’s was not the first frozen pizza to hit the market (that distinction belongs to) Tree Tavern in 1955, but Rose was the first to patent a pizza dough specifically designed to be frozen in 1979 after years of iteration and refinement.

They first started producing their frozen pizzas in a St. Louis Park factory that they purchased and initially outsourced their crusts frozen from Chicago. Rose was immediately dissatisfied with these crusts and referred to them as “the industry standard cardboard crust,” (Minnesota Inventors). She was determined to design a crust that would crisp after being frozen in a home oven to her satisfaction.

Even after opening a second factory in Fridley, MN in 1971, demand for their frozen pizzas still outpaced their ability to produce them. This combined with concerns about Jim’s health made the couple decide to sell the company to another Minneapolis brand on the rise, Pillsbury. The 1981 sale was for $22 million and was conditional that Rose retain creative control over her pizza recipe. She became Pillsbury’s first female vice president. Still not yet satisfied with the crust and now with a team of elite food scientists at her back, she and the Pillsbury team were the first brand to try frying the pizza crust before freezing to reduce starch retrogradation and help to maintain the structural integrity. This innovation resulted in her 1979 patent.

The fact that the Totino’s pizza brand continues its success to this day is a testament to Rose’s decades-long perseverance in perfecting her crisp crust. Since the discontinuation of the Celentano brothers’ frozen pizza line in 2000, the Totino’s brand, now owned by General Mills since the acquisition of Pillsbury in 2001, is the longest running frozen pizza brand still in production with no signs of slowing down. Between the approximately 10 Totino’s pizza sold each second and America’s ongoing snack affair with their pizza rolls, Rose’s legacy is secure for many years to come.