Albertsons brings restaurant quality with new own-brand frozen pizza line

Albertsons Cos. is raising its game in frozen pizza with the rollout of wood-fired, Neapolitan-style pizzas under its premium Signature Reserve brand.

Imported from Italy, the new own-brand collection includes four varieties of pizzas made in the historic village of Meduno with high-quality ingredients and techniques, including 24-hour pizza dough leavening baked on a lava stone from Sicily’s Mount Etna, Albertsons said Thursday. Each pizza has a “Neapolitan-style crisp and airy crust” that complements “restaurant-style toppings,” according to the grocer.

Signature Reserve frozen pizza choices include caprese (mozzarella cheese, seasoned tomatoes, tomato sauce and basil sauce pureed with lemon and garlic), mushroom and truffle (mozzarella cheese, champignon mushrooms, roasted garlic sauce and truffled mushroom sauce), sopressata (mozzarella cheese, spicy sopressata salami, Silician oregano and tomato sauce with roasted garlic, black pepper and oregano) and gorgonzola and bacon (gorgonzola marbled with a “sharp and earthly” flavor, bacon, “peppery and light” arugula and pear chutney drizzle).

The caprese, mushroom and truffle, and sopressata varieties contain no high-fructose corn syrup, while the caprese and mushroom and truffle flavors also are non-GMO, Albertsons noted.

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Signature Reserve’s new frozen pizzas join Albertsons Cos.’ assortment of other frozen pizza own brands in Albertsons and Safeway stores, including under the Signature Select label. The new pizza line also reflects a trend among grocery private labels to serve up restaurant-quality items and unique flavor combinations.

Albertsons has steadily expanded and enhanced its “Own Brands” lineup of private label. For example, in July, the Boise, Idaho-based grocer launched Vine & Cellar, a direct-to-consumer collection of curated wines sold only online.

In late May, Albertsons unveiled a realignment of its Signature brand—adopting Signature Select as the master label for its Signature product family, the largest in its Own Brands portfolio. That followed refreshes of its Open Nature and O Organics brands in March.

An Albertsons-commissioned survey of about 2,000 U.S. adults, conducted in May, found that 46% now buy more store-brand products than they did previously, and 47% purchase the same amount of these items. The top reasons that respondents cited for buying private brands were price (51%), quality (27%) and availability (26%), with many also writing in “taste” as a key factor in opting for the store brand.

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Albertsons’ Own Brands roster currently includes about a dozen brands and more than 14,000 items, and it generated sales of over $16.5 billion in fiscal 2022. The Signature Select, Signature Cafe, O Organics and Lucerne labels are among the retailer’s billion-dollar own brands, a club also expected to include Open Nature.

The latter brand is slated to be sold along with Albertsons’ Debi Lilly Design, Primo Taglio, ReadyMeals and Waterfront Bistro labels to C&S Wholesale Grocers under a divestiture package for the pending $24.6 billion Kroger-Albertsons merger. If the transactions gain regulatory approval, the brand sale will partially address overlap in the integration of Kroger’s and Albertsons’ private-label portfolios.