You wouldn’t think pizza and a cone go together. But Yoni Glatzer, owner of PCI Frozen Food does with his new pizza cones.
The New Jersey based company with their own 30,000 sq. ft. state-of-the-art HACCP approved facility, uses only top quality ingredients with this unique partially pre-baked crispy cone.
“I like to do things nobody else does, something unusual, original,” says Yoni Glatzer, President of PCI Frozen Foods. “So I found a very interesting product called pizza cones. I saw a couple of stores open up in New York City and Brooklyn, but neither succeeded and it made me wonder why didn’t it work, why isn’t anyone else doing this?
So he took a little trip to Italy, where they sell hotcakes, and he discovered that a chain offering franchises was the way to make it work. “You have to sell a lot of cones just to cover your rent in this country,” he says. But opening a franchise, which is often an investment of up to $500,000 here, is not possible for most people.
Glatzer thought long and hard, and decided he could do it, but not without some challenges. “It’s very complicated to create these cones.” Glatzer decided to do a Parve dough. “I did it myself. I did a lot of testing, brought in experts, until I had the perfect dough. They’re very unique. It’s not just a piece of dough folded in half with a seam that gets messy, but a piece of dough that comes from the bottom up and it has extra crunch on the bottom,” he explains. “The air pockets of dough are sealed, and because of all this, the cones won’t leak. No mess. When I was starting out, I was in the factory testing the dough and I made a cone and filled it up with water. When I was cleaning up about five hours later, I realized there was a cone standing there and not a drop of water leaking through. That seal also gives you that crunch. By the time you finish, fill it, bake it, that seal becomes the crunch and it is something delicious, it’s heaven.”
The entrepreneur originally thought he was going to hit pizza shops but once distributors started to get wind of the product, the business took a completely different turn. “Pizza cones started going into schools, hospitals, and nursing homes. I totally didn’t see caterers coming into the picture either, but when I started making mini cones, caterers took it for hors d’oeuvres and I went down another alley I didn’t expect,” Glatzer says.
What Glatzer originally thought was only going to be attractive to only certain foodservice operators and theme parks is now in almost any institution you can think of.
Glatzer’s hope for the future is that his product will find its way into supermarkets. PCI Frozen Foods is working with distributors, Jamac Frozen Foods Corp and S. Bertram Inc. on a regional level, along with Performance Foodservice / Roma Food on a national level. “That’s how I found out where it’s going. I said, which pizza shops? And my distributors said its not just pizzerias, it’s schools, hospitals, and large food service operations too. We receive calls all the time, where’s the product, where can I get it? It’s perfect for school functions, like PTA meetings and open houses. They serve the pizza cones with cheese and sauce, vegetables, even jello, mousse and hot chocolate. The staff just went crazy.”
He suspects that the popularity of his product comes from kids in neighborhoods around the schools asking for them at local shops and restaurants. “One caterer heated a cone in the oven. When it became hot, he dipped it into chocolate and walnuts and put in a scoop of Haagen-Dazs ice cream, and it was like a cold souffle. Like a hot cookie, cold ice cream and the way it melts on the bottom and the ice cream gets soft. Oh boy!”
But his dream is to distribute filled frozen pizza cones to supermarkets. “Mendelsohn’s Pizza in Brooklyn has our cones and freezes them with their own cheese, sauce and toppings, and makes margarita, mushroom-vegetable and chili versions that come in a pack with a few cones. It includes a little cardboard oven pan, diamond-shaped, with a hole on top, that can stand in an oven up to 450 degrees. You just defrost it, stick it in the oven and you have your pizza cone. If you could buy it at your local supermarket, what could be better than that?” To learn more about PCI Frozen Foods Pizza Cones, please visit www.pcifrozenfoods.com or call 1-732-707-9009.
