Goodbye Fly Guys; hello Prendisimo.
Prendisimo is McLane Co.’s new proprietary frozen pizza program for convenience stores. Following a product unveiling during the McLane Engage trade show in August, the brand was introduced at the 2023 NACS Show in October.
While at the NACS Show in Atlanta, Jon Cox, McLane’s new vice president of retail foodservice, spoke with CSP about the program.
“The nice thing about it is it comes over-wrapped with a retail label on it,” said Cox, who joined McLane about six month ago from Giant Eagle-owned GetGo Markets + Cafe convenience stores. “So, a store with a frozen food section or one of our mass customers could actually put it in their frozen-food section and sell it to take home to cook.”
A c-store, he said, can sell whole pizzas frozen, as well as sell cooked slices in the store.
The pizza is currently 14 inches, but Cox said down the road McLane might develop a personal size.
Beyond Proprietary
Cox said Prendisimo goes beyond being a proprietary offering. “It’s not like a frozen cardboard pizza; it’s a QSR restaurant-quality pizza that we want to be able to let our c-store customers surprise and delight their customers with,” he said. “It’s a high-quality pizza they wouldn’t expect to find at a c-store.”
This quality is all part of McLane’s evolution. The distributor announced its launch of McLane Fresh, an expansion of its foodservice-at-retail program, at the McLane Engage trade show.
“What we really wanted to do was evolve our fresh platform at McLane,” Cox said. “So, we transitioned McLane Kitchen to McLane Fresh from the standpoint of we wanted to tell people there was more to what we were doing than just being in the kitchen.”
McLane also has its recently launched beverage program CupZa! and has renewed its commissary brand Central Eats with new recipes.
Next Logical Step
Prendisimo was the next logical step to improve McLane’s pizza offerings, Cox said. Fly Guys, a previous pizza offer that was made by a different manufacturer for McLane, was “a stock kind of standard pizza,” he said.
In moving from McLane Kitchen to McLane Fresh, the company asked, “How do we elevate Fly Guys?’” Cox said. “It served its purpose for the time it was here, so that’s where we said, ‘We’re going to bring food people in. We’re going to get a strategic partner now that’s going to help us with a sauce and cheese and the ability to create LTOs.’”
Cox said that the word “kitchen” might make a c-store think they need a chef, which isn’t the case with McLane Fresh offerings.
“If you’re a small c-store chain and you have a 3,000-square-foot store, McLane Fresh is something you can do in your building,” he said. “You don’t need a carveout in your building to create a kitchen. You can have Prendisimo and a warm breakfast and lunch sandwich program in a limited amount of space.”
In Italian “prendisimo” translates to “take away,” Cox said.
“The thought was it would be pizza on the go or pizza to take home,” he said. “So, take it away from the frozen case to take home to your family or take it to consume immediately.”
Founded in 1894, McLane is one of the largest distributors in America, serving convenience stores, mass merchants and chain restaurants. With headquarters in Temple, Texas, McLane has more than 80 distribution centers across the country, employs more than 25,000 teammates and delivers to nearly every U.S. zip code. McLane is a wholly owned subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway, Omaha, Nebraska.