7. The emergence of the modern food chain
Post-World War II, Americans began their move to the suburbs. With them went the large supermarkets, which grew larger as they sprawled outside the cities. The specialty shops, the butchers, bakers, poulterers, fishmongers, vanished into the supermarkets, other than the ethnic specialty shops. The suburban landscape homogenized. But Americans returning from Europe brought with them the taste they developed for European foods, especially Italian cuisine. Pizza became a popular dish in the United States in the 1950s. Prior to then, it was consumed mainly in Italian ethnic neighborhoods.
In 1954, Joseph Bucci received a patent for frozen pizza, sold in stores and baked at home by American consumers. He applied for the patent in 1950, and before he received it frozen pizzas were common in the stores of the American northeast. Frozen pizzas from numerous marketers appeared throughout the 1950s and 1960s, and the pie became a major part of the food chain. By 1995 frozen pizza accounted for $1 billion in sales, and sales have continued to grow annually ever since. In the early 21st century, Americans consumed 350 tons of frozen pizza annually, and they are just a small part of the overall sales of pizza in the United States.