Ellio's Pizza
Three thin slabs to a box, each snapping crosswise into three slices: nine in all, and not a curve among them. The freezer-aisle pizza of a Northeast childhood, and the one that went on television in 1989 to call itself square.
Three Greek immigrants—Elias Betzios, George Liolis, and Manny Tzelios—founded Ellio's Pizza in 1963, blending their names into the brand. The signature 9-slice format didn't arrive until 1967: three rectangular pizzas per box, each sliced crosswise into three pieces. Why the pizza took that shape is not something anyone appears to have recorded.
The ads that lodged the brand in a generation's memory ran under McCain Foods, which acquired Ellio's in 1988. A 1989 spot insisted the pies were "hip to be square" — except they weren't square at all. They were rectangular, and always had been. "Easier, Cheesier, Crispier" followed in 1990. Ellio's own timeline is where most of the brand's folklore lives, and it is worth reading as marketing rather than record: it claims the pitcher Curt Schilling ate Ellio's before every game in 1993 on his way to the World Series, and that the rectangular slices caught on in schools because they fit the lunchroom tray. The tray detail is plausible and it is certainly the reason everyone remembers the shape. It is still Ellio's telling it. Despite distribution limited to the Northeast, the brand was the 9th best-selling frozen pizza in the entire country by 2007, with strongholds in New York City, Boston, and Philadelphia.
The pizza is still manufactured in Lodi, New Jersey, and still sold today, though ownership has since passed through Dr. Oetker (2014) to G.A. Productions LLC (2020).
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