Tombstone Pizza

In the early 1960s, Joseph, Ronald, Frances, and Joan Simek owned the Tombstone Bar, a small country tavern across the street from a cemetery in Medford, Wisconsin. In 1962, they began making small pizzas for their customers and expanded to making frozen pizza in a small factory next to their tavern for distribution to other bars and taverns. Demand was high, so they opened factories in Medford and Sussex, Wisconsin. Kraft Foods bought the operation from the Simek family in 1986. During the 1990s, Tombstone Pizza became America’s top-ranked frozen pizza, which was partly due to television commercials. One particularly successful one aired in 1995, featuring an eighteenth-century French aristocrat who, for his last wish, asks for a Tombstone Pizza with cheese and pepperoni; a falling guillotine blade slices the pizza. In 2001, Kraft extended its Tombstone Pizza line with a Mexican-style pizza.