It’s Halftime at Stuc’s

McHENRY – Fritz Larsen, owner of Halftime Bar & Grill in Johnsburg, has been busy lately.

Larsen partnered with Glenn Greenwood in 2009 to spin off a frozen pizza company called Halftime Pizza, which has about tripled in sales each of its first three years. This year, the company is on pace to sell about 140,000 frozen pizzas.

Halftime Pizza is in area Jewel food stores, and will be in Wal-Marts in the near future.

Larsen bought Stuc’s Pizza in McHenry last October. He kept the business’ well-known name but made some renovations to the inside of the building. He wanted to maintain the spirit of the store that he said has been a big part of the community for decades.

“Generations of McHenry people have eaten there,” he said. “Everybody knows someone who’s worked there.”

Larsen took the business principles that helped both Halftime locations – the second, Halftime Pizza & Ribs, is in Richmond – stay popular through the years, and apply them to Stuc’s.

“It’s a great product,” Larsen said. “The key to me was taking the Stuc’s recipes and adding the consistency and eliminating the variables to it.”

Larsen applies a similar idea to his frozen pizza venture. Between 1,000 and 1,250 pizzas are made three to four days a week, each with nearly the same ingredients as the pizzas at Halftime Bar & Grill. The only differences are the crust and sausage, which are changed in order to allow the frozen pizzas keep fresh longer.

All of Halftime’s frozen pizzas are manufactured in Johnsburg.

“If you mention frozen pizza to most people, they expect mediocrity at best, and they accept it,” Larsen said. “Our product’s completely quality driven, and it’s opening up doors for us on a weekly basis.”

It wasn’t until a local bowling alley requested frozen pizzas that Larsen considered expanding into that market. Raymond’s Bowl in Johnsburg requested 100 frozen pizzas in the first week. The next week, it placed an order for 150 pizzas. The week after, it was 200.

Word got out about the boost in sales, and Larsen started fielding calls from other bowling alleys, golf courses and bars.

The frozen pizzas for this “institutional” market, as Larsen calls it, are made with a thicker, “stadium” crust, and sold in 12-, 14- and 16-inch sizes.

But Larsen and his partner Greenwood wanted to capitalize on the buzz. They created a 12-inch, thinner crust pizza to be marketed to the retail world.

“The word kind of started spreading pretty quick,” said Greenwood, the company’s vice president of sales and marketing. “We started knocking on independent grocery stores one by one.”

As demand grew, Larsen and Greenwood decided to outsource production to Hot Mama’s Foods in Elk Grove Village. But in December 2011 they moved into a larger Johnsburg production facility and once again made all their pizzas in-house.

On the retail side, Halftime Pizza is now found in 27 Jewel food stores and several Woodman’s Foods locations. The company has signed off to place their pizzas in 64 Wal-mart locations in the near future, beginning with the 10 nearest to Johnsburg. They’re also found in a variety of independent grocers across northern Illinois.

On the institutional side, they serve large accounts like Advocate hospitals in Oak Lawn and Barrington, the Chicago Park District and Lincoln Park Zoo, in addition to little league parks, gas stations and bars.

And Greenwood and Larsen still are aggressively pursuing expansion.

“The rate we’re going, we have a pretty big facility to make pizza, but the issue we run into is freezer space – that’s what limits you,” Greenwood said. “So we’ve got another facility we’re looking at that was actually a frozen pizza facility prior. ... At the rate we’re going, we probably couldn’t stay in this building another year or so.”

Another option would be to once again outsource the retail pizza production. But Larsen said he’s wary of what that might do to the end result.

“We hope to maintain all the manufacturing ourselves because, again, it’s a quality-driven product,” he said.