A deep dish idea, brought to Britain in 1992.

Chicago Town sells itself on an American city, but it is a British frozen pizza brand, and its pizzas are made in Leyland, the Lancashire town just south of Preston. The brand tells its own story in two steps. Its deeper heritage, it says, goes back to Chicago in the 1940s, when pizza makers there raised the crust higher and created the deep dish. Its British story, the brand told the trade magazine Grocery Trader in May 2019, began in 1992, when its “founding fathers” came to the UK to bring what was then America’s best-selling frozen pizza to British families. The first product was the Deep Dish, a pizza with a high, walled base, and an Ultimate Deep Dish still leads the range.

The factory came first. The American frozen-food company Schwan’s opened a plant in Leyland in 1989, English Wikipedia says, and Food Manufacture reported in 2012 that the site, in the Moss Side area of the town, had been making pizzas since that year. Through the 1990s and 2000s it was the British arm of a business whose main market was the United States. When Britain’s Office of Fair Trading looked at the brand’s sale in 2009, it recorded that Schwan’s produced the Chicago Town range in the UK, owned the trademark of a second brand, The Great Texas Pizza Company, and also made own-label pizzas around Europe; the UK business had turnover of £77 million in its last financial year. The same decision described Chicago Town as “a strong brand in the UK.”

The range has grown in layers around the original pizza. According to Grocery Trader, the Takeaway range, built on a risen dough, arrived twelve years after the Deep Dish. In August 2017 the brand added a third family, The Pizza Kitchen, aimed at weekday family meals rather than the weekend takeaway night, launching it in Asda, Tesco and Sainsbury’s, Packaging News reported. That line was later renamed Tiger Crust, after its tiger-bread-style crust. A cheese-filled stuffed crust joined the Takeaway range in 2019, after research that the company said showed shoppers wanted one. Today the brand’s website groups its pizzas as Take Away, Ultimate Deep Dish and Tiger Crust, alongside lighter meals and sides.

A brand smile, then big blue panels.

Chicago Town’s packs have been redesigned by outside agencies several times, and the design trade press has written up the projects in detail. The first was a redesign of the Deep Dish packs by the agency The Design Group, which won a silver in the packaging category of the Design Business Association’s Design Effectiveness Awards. According to the association’s published case, the agency removed the main logo panel from the front of the box, added a curved “brand smile” beneath the Chicago Town name, and used photography that showed off the walled structure of the deep dish base. The entry reported sales growth of 14.9% in the 52 weeks after the change and said that by May 2009 Chicago Town Deep Dish had become the UK’s number one frozen pizza brand; those figures were submitted by the entrants.

The agency DECIDE took over the brand’s design in the late 2010s. In 2017 it created the branding and packs for The Pizza Kitchen, using deli cues to sell what the packs called a Deli Crisp Crust; its creative director, Grant Marshall, said the look had to sit within the family while having “a distinct personality of its own,” Packaging News reported. In June 2019 the same agency unveiled a wider rebrand covering the packaging and the website. Packaging News described a new, improved brand marque and big, bold blue graphic panels that unify the range and make it easier to spot as a block in the freezer, and said the sub-ranges were now separated by crust type to encourage shoppers to try more than one.

The 2019 work came with a single brand line, “Real Taste of Chicago,” which the brand adopted as its masterbrand proposition with a £5 million campaign that included television and social media, Grocery Trader reported. The same article put Chicago Town’s share of the frozen pizza sector at 27.8%, with sales of £114.9 million, the largest of any brand in the category. DECIDE said the new serving photography was meant to show the generosity of American-style toppings and the messiness of eating a pizza.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all make frozen food, pies or pasties sold in Britain: Birds Eye, McCain, Aunt Bessie’s, Young’s, Chicago Town, Ginsters and Pukka. Brands in this part of the British food trade sit at many different points in it, from family firms that still carry a founder’s name to names that now belong to much larger food groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a football ground or a petrol-station counter to a supermarket freezer.

A frozen or savoury food brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a pack, a name and the meal it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its factory or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its food is actually made and packed.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its food is made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A German owner and a doubled factory.

Chicago Town has belonged to Dr. Oetker, the German food company founded in 1891, since a deal agreed at the end of 2008. According to the Office of Fair Trading’s decision, Dr. Oetker (UK) Ltd bought Schwan’s European frozen pizza business under an asset purchase agreement dated 2 December 2008. The deal covered the Chicago Town and Great Texas Pizza Company brands, the factory in Leyland and part of a plant in Magdeburg, Germany; Dr. Oetker told the regulator it planned to move the German production it had bought to the UK within two years. TheBusinessDesk reported at the time that the purchase spanned Schwan’s business in 15 European countries, included licences for the Freschetta and Tony’s pizza names, and brought a Leyland factory employing about 300 people. Until then Dr. Oetker had supplied its Ristorante pizzas to Britain from continental plants. The OFT found that the combined business had more than 40% of frozen pizza supply in the UK, but on 5 May 2009 decided not to refer the merger for a fuller investigation.

The new owner kept building in Lancashire. In 2012 Food Manufacture reported plans to move a production line from Germany to Leyland, with an extension, offices and a cold store before South Ribble Council, and up to 120 new jobs over three years. In May 2019 Dr. Oetker completed a £30 million investment that it said doubled the plant’s capacity; a new production line for Chicago Town Deep Dish pizzas opened on 8 May 2019, together with faster freezing technology and more storage for raw materials, Food Manufacture and Just Food reported. The workforce had grown from 360 to 440 since Dr. Oetker took over, and the site makes both Chicago Town and Ristorante pizzas for Britain and for export, the company said.

For a design guide, Chicago Town shows how a British-made brand can borrow an American city and keep the story consistent from the name on the box to the crust inside it. Compare McCain and Birds Eye, two other names in the British freezer aisle. For this guide we use a panel blue, a sauce red and a melted-cheese yellow with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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