Tombstone Pizza

The siblings 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 serving pizzas in the tavern and also started packaging frozen pizzas in a small factory next door for distribution to other bars and taverns. As demand grew, they opened factories in Medford and nearby Sussex. Kraft Foods bought the operation from the Simek family in 1986. During the 1990s, Tombstone Pizza became America’s top-ranked frozen pizza, partly thanks to memorable commercials, such as the 1995 ad in which an eighteenth-century French aristocrat, about to be guillotined, requests a Tombstone pizza (with cheese and pepperoni) for his last meal. The guillotine blade is shown falling—only to slice the pizza. In 2011, Tombstone pizza offered twelve different flavor varieties.