Bagel Bites
Mini-bagels topped with tomato sauce and melty cheese, baked from frozen — and burned into memory by a jingle promising pizza in the morning, pizza in the evening, pizza at suppertime.
Bagel Bites were invented around 1982 in Fort Myers, Florida, by Stanley Garczynski and Bob Mosher, who rented a 2,000-square-foot warehouse, each put in $10,000, and built their snack from Lender's mini-bagels and Sargento cheese. They brought the product to market in the mid-1980s — by Garczynski's own telling, $500,000 in sales their first year, and nearing $10 million a year a couple of years later.
The pair sold the brand to Canada's John Labatt company in 1987, and in 1991 it landed with Ore-Ida, the Heinz frozen-food division, which put Bagel Bites in grocery freezers nationwide. What truly sealed them in memory, though, was a 1990s TV commercial whose sing-song refrain — "pizza in the morning, pizza in the evening, pizza at suppertime" — was adapted from the McGuire Sisters' 1957 hit "Sugartime."
In the early 2000s the brand hitched itself to skateboarding star Tony Hawk, a partnership Heinz credited with a 32% jump in consumption. Now owned by Kraft Heinz, Bagel Bites remain a freezer-aisle fixture and a shorthand for after-school snacking — parodied on shows from Brooklyn Nine-Nine to Ted.
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