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| - In May 2024, a post on the subreddit r/todayilearned (archived) claimed that pizza rolls — the savory food snack synonymous with frozen pizza company Totino's — were created by a cook who was trying to find new ways to use the egg roll-making machine at a company that specialized in manufacturing Chinese food.
Similar posts appeared on Facebook and elsewhere on Reddit.
(SappyGilmore on Reddit)
In short, the claim that pizza rolls were invented in the 1960s by a cook who worked for a Chinese food company was true.
Numerous news outlets — from The New York Times, to the nonprofit Minnesota news website MinnPost — and multiple snack food websites have credited the creation of the pizza roll to food industry titan Jeno Paulucci.
The Italian American businessman founded a U.S. company called Chun King that created and manufactured frozen Chinese food. Chun King was an early innovator in bringing items like chop suey and chow mein to American home kitchens in the 1940s and '50s.
According to his 2011 obituary in The New York Times, Paulucci said in 1955: "The food industry was missing the boat, allowing the restaurants to handle all the take-home business."
As part of its "frozen Cantonese dinners," Chun King included tiny egg rolls. These were made by a machine developed by inventor Eugene Luoma — also the inventor of Zip-It Drain Cleaner. This machine was specially designed to "automatically extrude fillings onto a continuous sheet of egg roll skin, then fold, seal and cut the product into little pillows," according to the memoir (screenshotted below) of Luoma's sister Beatrice Ojakangas, who herself was a cook at Chun King.
In her memoir, Ojakangas, who was in fact the cook referenced in the claim, said Paulucci was planning to sell Chun King to the tobacco company R.J. Reynolds but that "he wanted to retain the rights to the highly successful egg roll technology that he had developed" in order to create "a line of snack food products for a new company once Chun King had been sold."
The cook then wrote that she was tasked with experimenting with different fillings for the egg roll, and five or six of her 55 ideas involved "pizza" fillings. When Paulucci sampled the "pizza" fillings, Ojakangas wrote, he shouted: "That's it!"
But rather than becoming a Chun King product, the "Jeno's Pizza Roll" was to be sold by a new company — Jeno's Inc.
("Homemade Finnish Rye, Feed Sack Fashion, and Other Simple Ingredients from My Life in Food" by Beatrice Ojakangas)
In 1966, Paulucci did sell Chun King to R.J. Reynolds for $63 million, and part of the deal included a stipulation that Reynolds would produce pizza rolls for Paulucci's new company, Jeno's Inc., at cost plus 5%.
Advertisements for Jeno's Pizza Rolls can be seen in the YouTube video below.
Jeno's Pizza Rolls were eventually sold to the Pillsbury Corporation for $135 million. In 1993, Jeno's Pizza Rolls were folded into Pillsbury's Totino's brand and have remained Totino's Pizza Rolls ever since.
As for Ojakangas, she has written more than 30 cookbooks and has accumulated a variety of prestigious culinary awards, including multiple James Beard Foundation Awards.
However, the Reddit post did include a misattributed quote. It claimed Ojakangas said: "Pizza rolls are nothing but egg rolls with pizza crust and filling."
In fact, Paulucci made that statement to R.J. Reynolds when the time came to start producing the product, as described in the book "Self-Made: The Stories of 12 Minnesota Entrepreneurs."
("Self Made: The Stories of Twelve Minnesota Entrepreneurs" by Carol Pine and Susan Mundale)
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