If You Remember School Cafeteria Pizza, This Frozen Pie Provides Déjà Vu You Don't Need

The school cafeteria line was always a hit-or-miss situation. Some days, there would be chicken tenders with a side of mac and cheese, and other days, there would be soggy hamburgers with greasy string beans. While we yearn for the good ol' days of fresh-baked Otis Spunkmeyer cookies and bags of animal crackers, we certainly don't miss the days when the cafeteria lunchline served food that tasted like it hadn't seen the inside of a spice cabinet in 20 years.

On a recent deep dive into 17 frozen pizzas to avoid at all costs at the grocery store, we were reminded of yet another school cafeteria throwback: Ellio's pizza. This rectangular, frozen pizza made appearances in school lunches throughout the 1960s and 1970s, and there are plenty of '80s and '90s babies who remember tearing through the cardboard-like slices at school. But even if your particular cafeteria missed out, it won't take much imagination to place its particular taste in that noisy, echoey lunchroom. We found that this pizza tasted lackluster and underwhelming, and we're not the only ones. One Redditor called Ellio's "an abomination of pizza," while another referred to it as "the rectangular pizza that kinda sorta tasted like pizza."

Ellio's pizza was created in Long Island, New York, in 1963 by founders Elias Betzios, George Liolis, and Manny Tzelios. The trio used a combination of their names to form "Ellio's," making a huge impact in the frozen pizza scene with its unique shape, which fits perfectly inside a toaster oven, and making dinnertime a breeze. McCain Foods purchased the brand and relocated production to New Jersey in 1988, capitalizing on the pizza's success, until it was eventually purchased by Dr. Oetker in 2015 (the same parent company responsible for Pizza Ristorante frozen pizzas, aka one of those old-school food brands that are way older than you think).

You can still find Ellio's frozen pizzas at stores today, though they're not available everywhere. Plenty of people consider Ellio's bottom-of-the-barrel frozen pizza, but others swear by it. Push aside the obvious nostalgia factor, and you'll notice that people appreciate how cheap a box of Ellio's is and always has been. A box with three frozen pizzas costs around $3.99, depending on the store, and can occasionally be found at dollar stores for even less. While this frozen pizza won't conjure memories of fine dining and Michelin-star restaurants, it's certainly enough to bring forth memories of long cafeteria lines and steaming hot mashed potatoes (here's exactly what's in school cafeteria mashed potatoes, by the way).