Buscemi's Pizza is celebrating 70 years in business the same way it built its name in the first place — with square pies — except now those pies are showing up frozen in grocery store freezers instead of just behind the counter at nearly 60 Michigan locations. The Utica-based chain has placed its frozen pizza in 70 Kroger stores across Michigan, Ohio and Indiana, alongside roughly 150 independent mom-and-pop stores in the same three states.
The retail push is being led by Tony Buscemi's daughter and daughter-in-law, according to WXYZ Channel 7, marking a generational shift for a brand whose president still oversees the traditional franchise system his father built. That corporate structure lines up with details from Buscemi Retail Group, which describes its retail division as a women-owned enterprise co-led by Stephanie Buscemi, wife of the founder's grandson, and Natalie Buscemi-Fox, granddaughter of founder Paul Buscemi. Tony Buscemi, the article notes, serves primarily as president of Original Buscemi's, and told the station, “It's my dad's recipe, everything I knew came from his mother.”
The company traces its roots to founder Paul Buscemi, who opened the first store at Gratiot and Toepfer Road in East Detroit — now Eastpointe — launching Italian sub sandwiches in 1955 before adding square pizza by the slice the following year, according to a history detailed by MacombNow Magazine. Students from the neighboring East Detroit High School reportedly helped popularize single-slice sales in those early days. Buscemi's Hall Road location in Utica, the fourth store the company ever opened, has become something of a flagship, and Tony Buscemi said he wants every Buscemi's to follow its model of consistency.
A Recipe Customers Drive Past Other Pizzerias For
The chain now counts nearly 60 locations, with 10 more planned, per the WXYZ report. Regular customers described a loyalty that borders on ritual. Vincent Pouncy told the station he visits Buscemi's more than once a week and would rather drive to this location than eat at one closer to his house, saying, “There's one right by my house, I'd rather come here.” Robert Mulrenin, who visits about once a week, put it even more bluntly: “I pass three Buscemis to get to this one,” adding that he considers it “the best pizza in the area.”
Tony Buscemi told WXYZ the brand's staying power comes down to nostalgia and quality for customers who bypass other pizza places to get to a Buscemi's, and said the recipe traces back generations. That multigenerational throughline extends to how the company built its retail footprint in the first place. Original Buscemi's established Michigan's first party store franchise model in 1974, according to the Ordinary Legends Podcast, after Paul Buscemi and his son Tony spent two years navigating state regulatory approval to combine fast-food pizzerias with retail liquor licensing — a structure Michigan party stores still use today.
Solving the Soggy-Bottom Problem
Turning a fresh, hand-stretched Detroit-style pie into something that survives a freezer and a home oven is not a simple swap. Buscemi Retail Group has designed a patented multi-directional airflow crisping tray meant to elevate the pie and circulate heat above and below the crust, addressing the tendency of thick Detroit-style dough to turn soggy on a standard home baking sheet. Alongside the frozen pies, the company's retail roadmap includes distributing its own jarred pizza sauces to grocery aisles, built around what the family describes as its 70-year-old proprietary tomato sauce recipe.
Buscemi's is not the first Detroit-area pizzeria to make that leap. Buddy's Pizza, credited with creating Detroit-style pizza in 1946 when Buddy's Rendezvous baked Sicilian-style dough in rectangular blue steel pans originally made as automotive drip trays, already distributes frozen square pies to retailers including Meijer and Target. The industrial pans, according to Midstory, are credited with helping produce the caramelized cheese edges that define the style. Buscemi's now enters that same freezer aisle as a second major regional name chasing the same crowded shelf space.
Betting on a Booming Frozen Market
The timing tracks with a broader shift in how Americans eat pizza at home. The U.S. frozen pizza market was valued at $8.13 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $15.07 billion by 2034, according to the IMARC Group, driven by demand for premium crust options and quick-bake, restaurant-quality meals as dining-out costs climb. It is not the first time economic pressure has shaped Buscemi's growth: during Michigan's 2007 economic downturn, the company expanded to 60 franchised locations as independent convenience store owners sought high-margin food offerings to offset falling retail sales, according to PMQ Pizza Magazine.
That same reliance on hot food to prop up margins still defines how Buscemi's grows today. The company's expansion strategy leans on converting existing independent party and liquor stores into franchised locations within 60 to 90 days rather than building new ones, since independent owners earn significantly higher profit margins on hot food than on packaged grocery items, per Hour Detroit Magazine. Whether frozen pies on Kroger shelves end up drawing new customers into those storefronts, or simply give loyal fans like Pouncy and Mulrenin one more way to get their fix without the drive, remains an open question as the brand's next generation pushes further into grocery retail.
Hoodline previously reported on Detroit's food truck boom, where Paul Buscemi was also serving up Detroit-style pizza and calzones from a 32-foot truck downtown, a reminder of just how deeply the family's square-pie tradition runs through the region's food scene.
