(NEXSTAR) – What in DiGiorno is going on in Wisconsin?
Hundreds of Twitter users are stone-cold mystified by a viral video of the frozen pizza selection at a Wisconsin supermarket, which appears to show a seemingly endless freezer section filled with thousands upon thousands of pizzas.
It all started last week, when Milwaukee resident Michael Bradley tweeted out a video he filmed while leisurely strolling through the frozen foods section of a local supermarket chain. In the minute-long clip, he passed by over a dozen display freezers — and then an aisle-length island freezer, and a few end caps — each filled to the brim with hundreds of varieties of frozen pizza.
“A frozen pizza section in Wisconsin,” he captioned the video.
A week later, the clip had generated over 6 million views, as well as numerous questions from confused Twitter users outside of Wisconsin.
“What’s going on down there?” one demanded to know.
“Wisconsin, I have questions,” another surprised Twitter user said.
Twitter users from the region quickly identified the supermarket as a location of Woodman’s, a local chain with larger-than-average grocery stores in Wisconsin and northern Illinois. But even if Woodman’s has a bigger frozen section than most (one store has a “separate section JUST FOR BREAKFAST PIZZAS,” one user claimed), many users seemed to suggest that lots of Wisconsin supermarkets were well-stocked with pizza, though perhaps not to the extent as the one in the video.
“Wait, this isn’t normal?” one Wisconsin native asked.
“I was yesterday years old when I found out frozen pizza sections don’t look like this in other states,” another said.
The reasoning for such expansive frozen-pizza sections, some theorized, were Wisconsin’s cold, long winters which make ordering pizza more difficult than in warmer parts of the country. But it’s also likely that Wisconsin’s residents enjoy a larger selection because Wisconsin is home to the companies that produce national brands including DiGiorno and Tombstone, among others.
“Wisconsin is a frozen pizza kingdom,” the Appleton Post-Crescent once explained in a 2019 article.
Chris Zelch of Nestle’s frozen pizzas division further told the Post-Crescent that Wisconsin is the largest per-capita consumer of the brand’s frozen pizzas, which include DiGiorno and Tombstone as well as Jacks, Stouffer’s and California Pizza Kitchen, among others.
Lots of the cheese and meat used for the pizzas also comes directly from the state, Nick Fallucca, an executive at Milwaukee-based Palermo’s Pizza told Spectrum News the same year. He also echoed Zelch’s findings that indicated Wisconsinites eat more pizza, per capita, than anyone else in the U.S.
“It’s highly unlikely that any other state is going to take over from pizza production,” Fallucca said. “Wisconsin I think has that covered.