Are More Expensive Frozen Pizzas Worth It? Why Cheaper Pies Might Be Your Best Bet

There comes a point where certain convenience foods transcend their origins and become something else entirely, and frozen pizza is the perfect example. It's a familiar phenomenon in fast food; most people know that Taco Bell isn't exactly Mexican food, it's Taco Bell food. It has become a flavor palate in and of itself, and a very different craving than someone wanting, say, a carne asada taco from a local Mexican spot. Frozen pizza is the same. It doesn't taste like any good pizza you'd get freshly-made, yet it's delicious in its own way. If you want a great New York-style pie, even the best frozen pizza won't do, but sometimes you specifically want frozen. And with that unique frozen flavor, more expensive doesn't mean better.

As a lover of all things saucy and cheesy, frozen pizza has been a staple for decades. Even as I moved past trashy college dining habits and learned how to cook fresh meals for myself, it held a special place in my freezer. Maybe it's nostalgia, maybe convenience, but I can't deny that I still love it. And while I love to try every new brand that shows up in the grocery freezer, I almost always end up coming back to the same few brands. That is because those early, usually cheaper brands, like Tombstone or Red Baron, defined what frozen pizza is supposed to taste like. Sorry, Rao's, but if I want a wood-fired pizza, I'll go out to eat.

Testing the best frozen pizzas has become one of the internet's favorite pastimes, but if you start looking at too many of these lists, you'll notice something interesting. It's not who is at the top of most lists; it's that there is very little consistency to them at all. One tester will tell you DiGiorno or Red Baron are the best there is, only to have the next one say they're a frozen pizza you should completely avoid. Yes, there are some baselines frozen pizzas need to hit — you don't want bland toppings, and you want the crust to crisp up well — but this is one category of food that really does come down to personal taste and little else. It's not that pricer, higher-quality brands like Newman's Own pizza are bad — I actually think they are some of the best — it's that they are basically doing the exact same thing as cheaper brands like Red Baron.

Like it or not, the engineered, food science nature of a lot of these frozen pizzas means companies have spent a lot of time developing signature flavor profiles and textures. You may not like a DiGiorno pizza or a Totino's, but there is no substitute for them. You cannot make a gourmet version of Totinos, because it would become something else. It's one of the few problems in the world that money cannot solve.

Like street tacos or hot dogs, the reality is that frozen pizza was made to be cheap and easy, and while you can make a fancy version of it, they goes against the fundamental nature of the product. High-end frozen pizzas are getting better, but are still nowhere near as good as the real thing. But they don't taste like the classic cheap frozen pizzas we come to love kids. It's like the uncanny valley of food; you either want something fully fresh or fully artificial, and something that falls in between satisfies nobody.

More expensive brands can be one of two things: They can go the Newman's Own pizza route and make pies that are similar to existing brands, ideally a little better, or they can go the Rao's route and try and make something that is a genuinely good pizza. But neither can replace a cheap frozen pizza, because one is just a more expensive copycat, and the other doesn't replicate that unique frozen pizza taste properly.

I won't discourage you from dropping a few extra bucks on a Screamin' Sicilian pizza if you really think it's worth it, but most of the time, you will get 95% of what you want from a Tombstone pizza than you will from any other brand, and you'll spend half as much. Some things really are just better off kept simple.