Why You Should Avoid Wegmans If You're Looking For The Ultimate Frozen Pizza

One of the quickest ways to take your frozen pizza to the next level is to buy it from anywhere other than Wegmans. To help steer pizza-loving foodies right on busy weeknights, Tasting Table rounded up a list of 17 frozen pizza brands to avoid at all costs – and Wegmans' Bake & Rise pie made the "no-no" list. As mentioned in our review, "It has a very thick, doughy appearance that wouldn't endear us to it from the aisle [...] the crust was too thick to balance out the amount of sauce and cheese on this pizza, leading to a pretty lackluster eating experience."

Wegmans' Bake & Rise frozen pizza is topped with uncured pepperoni and a blend of low-moisture and part-skim mozzarella, parmesan, Romano, and Asiago cheeses. It might sound like a flavorful bouquet, but in reality, the pie has a pretty dismal 2.7 out of 5 stars based on customer reviews on Wegmans' website. "Flavorless. Crust rises okay, but everything else about this is meh," writes one customer. Others agree, stating, "Not acceptable. The Bake & Rise pizza is a flavorless slab of dough that has no place being part of a pizza," and "Dough is very cakey [...] Makes 7-Eleven pizza seem gourmet." 

Indeed, our taste-testers echoed this unpleasantly-doughy criticism. In fact, we likened Wegmans' ultra bread-y Bake & Rise dough to a flat, circular breadstick, which isn't what anyone expects or wants from a frozen pizza crust.

Wegmans' Bake & Rise 29.6-ounce pizza runs for $4.49 at a store location in Brooklyn, New York. The price is right, but that's about the only praise we can give this product. While we'd like to write it off as a fluke, Wegmans' offering consistently underperforms. In another frozen pizza taste-test, in which we ranked 30 popular frozen pies, Wegmans' Bake & Rise once again came in at a bleak 25th place. By contrast, Screamin' Sicilian Pizza Co.'s Bessie's Revenge Cheese (a 20.8-ounce frozen pie that ranked second in our ranking) costs a higher $7.99 at a ShopRite in New Jersey. But, by our count, we would rather spend a couple extra bucks on a pizza we'll actually enjoy eating than waste $4 on Wegmans' round, flabby breadstick. 

Perhaps due to that the pizza's weirdly thick crust, Wegmans' Bake & Rise takes 22 to 27 minutes to cook at 425 degrees Fahrenheit, which is comparatively longer than better-tasting competitors. For reference, Red Baron's Brick Oven Crust takes 16 to 18 minutes, and DiGiorno's Rising Crust takes 19 minutes; both requiring a baking temperature of just 400 degrees Fahrenheit.

It's worth admitting that, ultimately, we're talking about a food item that is comes premade and frozen in a cardboard box. To expect pizzeria-worthy quality would be to set any frozen pie up for failure. Still, a pleasantly chewy crust, bright tomato sauce, and enough cheese to deliver on gooeyness doesn't feel like too much to ask for — which is all more than Wegmans' pizza delivers.