Celeste Pizza Is Discontinued: Conagra Has Stopped Making It

By Zach Miller

Conagra Brands has stopped making Celeste frozen pizza. CEO John Brase disclosed the exit in the company’s fiscal first-quarter remarks on September 30, and a company spokesperson told Fox Business this week that production has already ended, with stores selling whatever inventory is left. Once that is gone, the microwavable Pizza For One that has been a grocery brand since Quaker Oats bought the business in 1969 goes with it.

The confirmation came as a single line in an earnings script, not a product announcement. That is why the details that matter to a shopper — how much is left, and until when — are still thin.

What Conagra actually said

In pre-recorded remarks for the quarter, Brase listed the steps Conagra has taken to simplify itself and then named the brand. “One early example is our decision to exit the Celeste frozen pizza business,” he said, according to the remarks Conagra published. He put the cost at about 15 basis points of first-quarter net sales and said the company expects the move to help margins from here.

A week later a spokesperson filled in the practical detail for Fox Business: “We will continue to sell inventory, but we stopped producing it.” The spokesperson added that, as things stand, there will be no Celeste products once the existing stock is sold.

Trade coverage lines up. Food Business News reported the same figures on October 1, and per the Motley Fool’s transcript of the call, Brase told analysts the exit was a minor hit to sales that added to profit.

What is and is not confirmed

Confirmed, on the record: production has ended and the remaining inventory is being sold down. Not confirmed: a date. Some coverage points to early 2027 for the brand disappearing completely, but The Takeout’s report describes that timing as a rumor, and nothing in Conagra’s remarks or its statement to Fox Business puts a date on it.

Availability is already uneven. A Cox Media Group report, citing TheStreet, says some stores had stopped carrying the pizzas and that Walmart listed them as out of stock on October 3. Conagra has not said which retailers still have supply.

You will also see the brand’s age reported as anything from about 60 to nearly 90 years. Both ends are defensible. They are counting from different starting lines.

From a Chicago beer garden to the freezer aisle

Celeste Lizio and her husband Anthony came to the United States from Italy in the 1920s and opened the Kedzie Beer Garden on Chicago’s West Side in 1937, according to UPI’s 1988 obituary. They sold the restaurant in 1962 and began selling frozen pizza in bulk to local Italian restaurants. Some of this week’s coverage spells the name Lizzio and says the restaurant closed rather than sold; I am going with the wire report written at the time.

Quaker Oats bought the business in 1969, put her picture on the box and kept her on as a spokeswoman and consultant. She died in 1988 at age 80. The brand later passed through Aurora Foods and Pinnacle Foods, and it reached Conagra when the company completed its Pinnacle acquisition in October 2018.

So: 1937 if you count the restaurant, 1969 if you count the grocery brand.

Why Conagra cut it

Brase’s explanation to analysts was blunt. Small brands that earn little or nothing are worth exiting quickly, and Celeste was one of them.

For scale, 15 basis points is 0.15 percent. Against roughly $2.6 billion in quarterly organic net sales, that lands in the neighborhood of $4 million. That is my back-of-envelope arithmetic, not a figure Conagra published, and it covers a quarter in which the wind-down was already under way.

The company says it has launched a full review of its product lineup and is taking an aggressive approach to trimming it, with most of the benefit expected over the next 12 to 18 months. Brase told analysts Conagra has more than 400 single-serve meal SKUs alone, the industry term for individual products, and wants a simpler assortment. He declined to speculate about which brands could follow.

What to watch next

Three things. First, whether Conagra puts a date on the end of Celeste supply; so far it has not. Second, which products follow as the lineup review plays out over the next year and a half.

Third, whether the name resurfaces under another owner. Nothing reported so far suggests a sale, and the spokesperson framed the no-more-Celeste statement as the position for now.

For now the confirmed facts are short. Conagra stopped making it, stores are selling what is left, and nobody has announced a last day.