The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of Bob's Pizza

An American Story

(ED. NOTE: This one, banged out around midnight, just got away from me. I veered off in an unexpected direction and had to keep typing to see where it went.)

The Monday piece mentioned a block party. I was amazed to see how much pizza they had. At least 20 boxes from Pizza Luce. We waved as we passed, and the fellow manning the pizza distribution offered us a slice. It’s Pizza Luce! Thanks! But no, we’re off to eat charitable prepaid steak.

Pizza Luce is a local chain with a great reputation. I’m not sure how they got it, except all of a sudden everyone agreed it was the awesome cool brand. There are two kinds of great-rep local chains, I think  - ). the one that has all the fancy vegan add-ons and menus with self-consciously curlicue hipster penmanship, and 2) the one that’s been turning out classic pizzas since 1962. Luce is the former. I’m sure they’ll make you a pie with gorgonzolla cheese and marinated artichoke hearts. They’ll drizzle your sausage with truffle oil, and you can’t say that about many places that don’t get raided regularly.

The “classic pizza” good-reputation local chain has boxes with a picture of a toque-wearing chef with a pointy mustache,  kissing his fingertips to indicate Italian delights. Their website, which looks like it went up in 1998, says that Bob’s Pizza Pie was founded by Bob Arnold in Lac DuBoeuf,  Wisconsin,  because he had a passion for pizza.

No he didn’t. He had an idea he could make some money hopping on the pizza popularity, is what he thought. But these days everyone who does something has to be passionate about it, right?  Here at Valvoline, we’re passionate about air filters! Maybe the markup part.

The pizzas of the early days were good, but unsophisticated. Cracker crust with the flavor profile of ironed newspapers; a smear of sauce that might have come from a Boy-Ar-Dee can; salty cheese,  so your date would order a second Tab or Teem; little cups of pepperoni, their perimeters singed and crispy, half-filled with grease after they came out of the oven. It would be square cut. It would be delicious. Everyone in town loved a Bob’s Pizza Pie.

Bob did okay, year after year.

Then one day a man in a good suit - but not too good -  dropped in to the store, asked to talk to Bob. Sorry, Bob passed away in ’86. His son runs it now. I can get Bob Jr. on the phone; can you wait? He’d wait. They chatted and set up an appointment.

A few days later the man in the suit met Bob Jr. in the back office of the new store. It was the third in town - the original, his dad’s place,  was downtown, the second was tucked in a strip mall in the new development they put up in ’73, and the third was on the south side of town, where the town was really booming. It was the nicest restaurant of the three. He’d gone all in, filled it up with old pizza-place nostalgia, framed photos of his dad with famous locals who’d come through over the years, a big oven paddle signed by Bob Sr. himself framed in the dining room, classic restored Rock-Ola jukebox from 1967. It was really nice.

The man made a proposal: Ever thought about selling your pizzas in stores, frozen? You have a great story here, and people love the classic neighborhood pizza joint. They remember the one they grew up with. They’ll transfer that loyalty to you, because you have a passion for pizza.

Bob Jr. blinked and nodded and wondered if the guy had noticed on his way in that the dining room was deserted. It was killing him. He’d opened too soon. The houses in the new development weren’t selling at the clip the developers had predicted. Mortgage rates, lumber costs,  maybe the high-end homes were too high-end for the town. You know who was selling pizza out here? Little Frickin’ Caesars, because they got the guys who were building the houses. Five bucks a pie, how you going to compete? The people who had moved in, half of them associated Bob’s Pizza with the cramped store in the old strip mall, just another joint.  If they had childhood memories of the stuff,  they got overruled by their own kids who wanted Pizza Hut because they saw the ads and wanted something gooey with extra sides of wings. He’d have to add wings at some point. He didn’t have a choice.

As the man explained it, Bob wouldn’t have to do a thing. The man represented a company that handled several brands, each pitched to a different demographic. You had the cheap ketchup-on-a-frisbee pizza sold in bars.  The one for the housewives who wanted something with a classy typeface on the box that made them think they were sampling something hand-tossed in the shadow of Vesuvius. The big manhole cover with all the meats for the dad-bod Sunday Football crowd. What they lacked was a premium pizza with a story, a neighborhood fave, and Bob’s, well, Bob’s was that pizza. They’d pay him for the brand.

What do you think, Mr. Arnold?

A year later Bob’s Pizza Pie appeared in grocery store freezers in a three-state area. It came in a box, not a shrink-wrapped plastic sleeve, because there had to be room on the back for the story. The photographers had come to the first store and taken pictures, and used some of the original B&W photos from his dad’s scrapbook. The marketing department sent out press releases to the papers and radio stations, talking up Bob’s Story. One of the morning shows down in the Cities sent someone to Bob’s town to interview people who grew up on Bob’s Pizza, raving about a local fave.

The pizzas were discounted for launch, but the price was still above the middle-range classy brand. The reviews seemed indifferent - you could do worse. The pizza subreddits were brutal, because everyone on Reddit was horrible and lived to be better than everything and everyone. The subreddit for his town was full of unflattering comparisons between the frozen taste and the genuine article, with most people concluding there was no relation between the two. Just a name.   

Sales were . . . okay. Bob couldn’t help but notice that it was always discounted at his local grocery store. But he had other problems by then. The third store wasn’t working at all - even with the wings - and he closed it after two years. (A Thai place went in and did steady business.) The strip mall location closed when the property was sold to a developer who put up Senior Living. That left only the old downtown store, which had staggered along on take-out orders from the houses on the periphery of downtown, the hospital up the street,  the big dorm the local college had built. Bob’s kids, who’d grown up working in the hot kitchen feeding the ovens, didn’t want to go into the business.

Bob closed up Store #1.

A piece in the local paper (just a shadow of its old self by now) lamented the loss of a piece of downtown history.  People who came in to pick up a pizza to go saw the notices about the imminent closing, and they said they were sad to see them go, end of an era. One or two old-timers came by and told him stories about his dad. One had been working there the night his dad got held up. Bob had forgotten all about that story.

That night he went online and googled a few words about the hold-up, and found a newspaper article. The robber took $37. He found another article about the robber’s capture when he held up Pizza Delight on the Southside. Bob googled the name and found what seemed to be the right fellow. Did time, got out, settled a few towns over, died in a trailer fire. Son went to jail a few years later.

Well, Bob thought, all things considered, we’ve been on the right side of it all. The pies put me through school and I gave my kids a good upbringing. They were the kids whose dad was the pizza guy. The name on the box at the church teen parties. The name on the box at the post-playoff football team celebration.

The smartest thing his dad ever did was buy the building. Two stories, 1927. Upstairs apartments had produced some rent over the years. Bob got an offer from a local who’d sold his software company to Microsoft and had play-around money, and he wanted to open an art gallery, with offices upstairs. But he wanted to keep the old signs, the neon PIZZA sign that blinked on and off. Bob thought the guy was a bit odd, but nice enough. The world was full of these guys now and they all the money and the energy. Let him have it.

Bob and the wife moved to Florida, where all the frozen pizza brands were different.

He was surprised when the frozen-pizza company wanted to re-up the licensing contract. As he learned, the bottom brand, the bar brand, the drunk-dude-with-a-toaster-oven brand, was kaput. Bad sausage. Food poisoning. Recalls. It was dead. They wanted to move Bob’s down a notch to fill the space. It would mean just shrink wrap, no box. No room for the backstory. It also meant a steady supply of licensing checks. A few years later he sold them the rights free and clear.

Around the time of the sale, corporate noted that the Bob’s sales were up, way ahead of the brand it replaced. Turned out there was something about the Bob’s formulation, the recipe, that set it apart, an extra bit of oregano, a dash of garlic, a few flakes of chili pepper. Bob’s had become cool among the people who drank old beer brands ironically. Websites that  kicked out click-bait and listicles, written by underemployed 20-somethings who prided themselves on their hipster cred, started writing about The Best Cheap Frozen Pizza You Never Tried and You’re Doing Frozen Pizza Wrong and IDK If This Is the Best Frozen Pizza But I Think It Is.

Bob’s blew up. It surged to the top of the distributor’s sales, and they commissioned a local ad agency to come up with some ads to capitalize on the sudden popularity. It was a new agency, full of 20-something creatives, run by a guy who’d left a big agency in The Cities to forge out on his own. They created a character named, well, Bob: a classic Italian chef with a white coat and a tall puffy hat and a thin pointy mustache.  The web ads followed this comic “vintage” character navigating the modern technological world with an absurd sense of old-world panache. He had a catch-phrase: when confronted with some indignity of modern life, he would deadpan the line “This . . . I do not like.” And then you’d see him in his restaurant, gesturing at a pizza. “This?” He would kiss his fingertips with serious intent, and wink.

It turned into a meme: The actor’s picture, the phrase “This . . . I do not like” in Impact font. It had a good run, and inevitably the catchphrase was used on memes for other characters, from Skeletor to Squidward, and so on. Then another  unexpected development: the actor who played “Signore Bob” had acted in a movie directed by an independent director a year before he did the ads, and the movie had unexpectedly become a hit on Netflix. The actor’s small but pivotal role - not unlike his Signore Bob character - was lauded by all the critics, and YouTube hits on his pizza commercial ads soared into the millions.

At the peak of Signore Bob’s popularity,  the distributor sold all its brands to an international food conglomerate. The people in charge of the frozen foods division were smart enough to know that Signore Bob had legs, and commissioned the start-up ad agency to take the brand nation-wide. With a budget of millions, the actor and Signore Bob embarked on a series of ads that took the character around the world, inevitably encountering something unfortunate - “This . . . I do not like” - and ending up in the warm familiar space of his restaurant, each spot ending with a different celebrity cameo, who would also kiss the tip of his fingers. They even got Snoop for one.

The ad agency, ever nimble, commissioned a new series of ads in which Signore Bob only said the word “This,” with his subtle and expressive face telling you all you needed to know. At the moment the entire cultural meme seemed on the verge of playing out, the company brought out a style of the pizza that had a different crust and more exotic toppings. It was teased for a few weeks with YouTube ads that showed Signore Bob looking at something in the oven, then turning to the camera and opening his mouth - only for the ad to stop before he could speak. The full ad was finally unveiled at the Super Bowl, when Signore Bob placed the new, improved pizza on the table to the sound of a Puccini overture, and then signaling for silence, leaning forward, eyes gleaming, and saying one word: “That.”

For the next year the campaign for Bob’s Pizza had the Signore character riffing on the ideas of this and that, until a new line of add-ons (including wings) required him to say “These!” This marked the third and last year of the campaign. After a change in management, a new ad agency was selected, and they decided to take the brand back to its roots. They recreated the original Bob’s Pizza location in CGI, and shot commercials in gauzy golden light, where a nice middle-aged man - Bob Jr., the screen said - talked about his dad and his passion for pizza, and how they use only Wisconsin cheese and vine-ripened tomatoes.

Bob Jr. had suffered a stroke a while back and spent his last years in assisted living. He became agitated when he saw those ads on the TV in the commons area. “That’s not me,” he’d shout, almost tearful. “It’s not.” The staff would say no, of course it isn’t, and wheel him back to his room.

What a strange thing to say. Of course it wasn’t him. Why would he think that it was?