Reinventing A Food Icon

Emilio De Lorso’s Passion To Bring Ready- Made Pizza Bases To Australia Began In A Garage. Today, Della Rosa Traditional Fresh Foods Produces More Than 5,500 Pizza Bases An Hour, Just Like Mamma Used To Make.

- Wendy Kay

Guests joining a De Lorso family dinner are often confused. Not by the noise – loud is what you’d expect from an Italian family – but by the conversations flying rapidly back and forth in Spanish, Italian and English.

Della Rosa Traditional Fresh Foods Director Emilio De Lorso laughs at the chaos created when his extended family tucks into a meal produced from his wife’s “food factory”.

“It gets a little crazy. My wife will speak in English, my sons, in-laws and parents will answer in Italian, while I speak Spanish with my siblings. But we all understand each other.”

While the language may be unpredictable, there is always one consistency at the table. Della Rosa pizza. “Of course, fresh or frozen, we always have them at home. But we don’t sit down to eat a whole pizza. We have a slice of this, another of that and that’s how we do it.”

With 5,500 Della Rosa pizzas churned out hourly at the company’s factory in Melbourne’s Campbellfield, there’s no longer any need for Emilio’s mum, Carmen, to make the dough herself as she did during the early days of the company. Although Carmen drops in regularly, these days she leaves the manufacturing process to state-of-the-art equipment imported from Italy.