Home Run Inn is a family owned & operated establishment with nine restaurants throughout the Chicago area. They’ve been making pizza since 1947 and began creating and selling frozen pizzas for grocery store distribution nationwide in the 1960s. Dan is the 4th generation leader of Home Run Inn Pizza. He started in the family business at the age of 13 as a busboy. Home Run Inn’s signature square-sliced pizzas originated in the 1940s when the tavern would slice the pizza into small sample-sized pieces to entice customers. The restaurant’s frozen pizza was born after a regular customer used to request par-baked pizzas to take to his summer home in Wisconsin. Home Run Inn Pizza has a synergistic relationship between the restaurant brand and the frozen brand and doesn’t view the relationship as cannibalistic when it comes to sales for either brand. QUOTES “Everyone who has a restaurant wants to get into CPG. They want to put it in grocery stories. They think it’s easy to do CPG.” (Michael) “Our first distributor was our bartender. He would take pizzas after work, walk them down to the corner grocery store and pick up the cash the next day.” (Dan) “Our frozen pizza production facilities model and mirror what we did in the restaurants. My uncle would say, ‘The reason we make it like that is because that’s the only way I know how.’” (Dan) “Pizza is like sex. It’s all good, but some is better than others.” (Michael) “The (Home Run Inn Pizza) restaurants drive brand awareness on the marketing side for our frozen pizza.” (Dan) “A brand is a promise. Many times, an agency is hired to create that story or build that authenticity. What’s beautiful about what Home Run Inn Pizza has, is that (story) is already baked in.” (Michael) TRANSCRIPT 00:00.22 vigorbranding And with some great guests and so I thought well we should keep it going. It's good for social media. It's good for you know it's good. So I mean you know I'll be honest've I'm only done a few of these but it's been fun and you know I don't know it's just ah, you know the guys do a great job. So it turns out all right? yeah.   00:06.19 Dan Costello Um, yeah.   00:16.98 Dan Costello Um, cool, Awesome. Look forward to it. Don't give hi.   00:19.29 vigorbranding Yeah, yeah, yeah, know yeah this will be this will be a lap for you I mean you know it's just just like your story and I mean it sincerely I mean great story, great family. Great product. It's just you know it's just it's just super cool. We got a guy here working the production Robert who you're already his fan. He's a huge fan of home run his friends.   00:28.80 Dan Costello Gun.   00:36.54 vigorbranding Took him there and he you know is one of his best buddies is out there archer ra and thirty first street with archer a thirty first yeah Yeah, so yeah, yeah, so yeah, yeah, heyan on one thing we're you know can keep casual and loose. We're already kind of rolling here. Um, just 1 thing he got to do once we kind of finish up the convo.   00:42.27 Dan Costello Ah, okay, nice Robert very good.   00:55.40 vigorbranding We just gotta have you hang on the line thus til your tilll your file kind of uplis what locally so we' probably just got hang out for extra 10 minutes when we're done reporting just to make yeah just to make sure everything you know gets off load quickly and everything everything like that. Okay, we're wrong. So guy you're ready cool hi.   01:02.40 Dan Costello At the end of it. Yes, yes.   01:12.79 Dan Costello Um, new promise.   01:14.91 vigorbranding Well again, this will be fun casual tell stories. Enjoy it. It's all good. So I'm I'm ready when if Dan's ready if you're ready Robert yeah, we're good to go best all right. all right   01:24.43 Dan Costello Hi whenever you're ready I'm good