Goodfella's
Goodfella's is an Irish well-known and popular brand of frozen pizzas. It had been the leading brand of frozen pizza in the UK until 2005 and is still the leading brand of frozen pizza in Ireland.[1] The UK frozen pizza market is worth around £400m.
History
Green Isle, headquartered in Naas, created the brand in 1993. In the early 1990s, varieties of frozen food in the UK was fairly limited to fish fingers, beefburgers and frozen chips. Frozen food in the UK was largely provided by Birds Eye.
Northern Foods bought Green Isle Foods of the Republic of Ireland in 1995. Northern Foods was founded on 15 August 1949. Green Isle Foods Ltd was founded in Ireland in 1982, and employs around 750 people in Ireland. The division has also been known as Green Isle Food Group.[2] In 2005 it expanded its Naas factory, increasing 130 jobs, with help from Enterprise Ireland. The site made 9-inch and 12-inch pizzas.[3]
The pizzas are popular amongst university students. In an annual UK survey of 2006, the pizza brand was, with Magners cider, in the two fastest-growing food products of the year. Also in 2006, the brand sponsored the ITV show Dancing on Ice (series 1). In 2010, the pizza brand was accounting for 10% of all of Northern Foods' £980m sales.
Production
The pizzas have contained a genetically-modified version of chymosin since the late 1990s, as this was the only vegetarian rennet it could find.
Naas
The pizzas are made in Naas, the county town of County Kildare on the IDA Industrial Estate (496407 postcode) next to the M7 bypass, and Longford, County Longford, in the Republic of Ireland. It is part of the Branded Division of Northern Foods. The site produces around 2m pizzas a week. In March 2016, an engineer was crushed to death at the Naas factory.[4]
Longford
Northern Foods also makes pizzas under the San Marco brand, in addition to the Goodfella's brand, at its Longford site, Green Isle Foods (Longford) Ltd, at the junction of the N4 and N63, which opened in 2000, and bought by Green Isle in 2001. It has around 130 employees and produces around 800,000 pizzas a week.
See also
- Dr. Oetker (Pizza Ristorante), which merged its pizza division with Schwarz (of the USA) in 2009, and have since taken the market leadership for frozen pizza in the UK, and Northern Foods have taken legal action with them over their misleading advertising[5]
- Goodfellas, 1990 Martin Scorsese iconic gangster film