When Ernie & Enzo, the boys from Birrittella's Pizza Dough, call with big news to share, I go running. This is especially true when the meeting is to take place at Knapp II Pizzeria in Brooklyn, a classic New York slice shop owned by Enzo.
We recently reported big news for Birrittella’s—the launch of their protein-rich pizza dough in 100 Walmart stores in the middle-Atlantic region. The new news is even bigger: Target has added Birrittella’s original and whole wheat pizza dough to 750 of their stores nationwide. Wow.
That’s a lot of stores. Good thing Birrittellas’s makes a lot of dough balls (between 2 and 2.5 million per year) between two production facilities in New York State. The majority of the production is custom packaged for a supermarket chain and shipped to their stores nationwide. Both the Walmart and Target deals are under the Birrittella’s label, an intentional effort to raise the profile of the brand.
The Birrittella’s brand should be championed, as it’s a great story and a great product. The story began in 1910 when Vincenzo Birrittella arrived from Sicily and opened a bakery in Tarrytown, NY. He and his sons and his son’s sons ran the business for more than 100 years, introducing the first retail-available pizza dough in the 1980s. When the business went up for sale, it caught the attention of two pals from Brooklyn, Ernesto Cappello and Vincenzo Conigliaro (Ernie & Enzo), entrepreneurs with serious expansion plans for the antique bakery.
Along the path to said expansion, they discovered a unique packaging configuration that further differentiates Birrittella’s from all of the other pizza doughs available in retail: a vacuum-seal that not only extends shelf-life from a few weeks to nearly 80 days but also prompts a cold fermentation process that happens organically and improves the dough’s flavor, texture and elasticity. More on all of this can be found in the review I wrote of the dough back in 2023.
We celebrated the superiority of the Birrittella’s product at Knapp II with slices and toasted to their continued success. We at Appetito are a small business, too, and we love to champion the good people in our community who are committed to the type of quality that defines the best Italian products. We also like when they feed us pizza.
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