This post contains affiliate links.
If there is a pizza for the person who is pinching pennies, it just might come from Totino’s. The company sells cheap eats all around, the most famous being a little 10-ounce pizza. Despite the pizza’s small price tag — currently $1.50 at Walmart — Totino’s pizzas manage to have a crispy crust and a flavor that isn’t half-bad.
In my quest to see what other budget pizzas are out there, I couldn’t help but note that Dollar Tree sells its own pizzas. Given that everything at Dollar Tree is currently $1.25, I figured I ought to give this one a try, to see how it stacks up.
Creations Microwaveable Three Meat Pizza can be found in the Dollar Tree frozen case. The extreme discounter also sells a pepperoni pizza and a combination pizza, but I didn’t spot either of those in my stores when I picked this one up. Of note: Creations is a Dollar Tree-exclusive house brand, distributed by Greenbrier International.
The pizza is 7.2 ounces, which comes out to about 17.3 cents an ounce. That’s more per ounce than Totino’s pizza, which comes out to 14 cents an ounce.
This pizza should be kept frozen until it’s time to heat it up. It can be microwaved, as the box suggests, or cooked in the oven.
To bake, preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Then remove pizza from the carton and wrapper and place it directly on the middle oven rack. Next, bake for 18-20 minutes or until the cheese blend is melted. Finally, let it sit for 2 minutes before eating.
To microwave, the instructions recommend a 1200-watt model with a rotating carousel. To cook, first remove the pizza from the carton and wrapper. Next, place the pizza on a microwave-safe plate. Then, microwave the pizza on high for 3 minutes. The instructions say that if the cheese blend isn’t fully melted at that point, to cook for additional time in 10-second increments until the cheese blend is fully melted.
I figure the pizza is best baked, but since the pizza advertises being microwaveable, that’s what we did.
It doesn’t exactly win a beauty contest, especially out of the microwave.
My family tried it, and we’d describe it as a poor man’s Totino’s. This isn’t exactly high praise since Totino’s is, by definition, a poor man’s pizza. The flavor was okay — nothing was terrible — but none of it was exactly great, either. The pizza doesn’t have a lot of cheese, the sauce was about par for the course, and the sausage was fine, if not spectacular.
The crust, meanwhile, was rubbery in the middle and a little hard on the outside. That’s what you would expect from a microwaveable pizza, although I’ve been lucky enough to try little microwaveable pizzas from the grocery store that come in specially designed microwaveable cartons to keep the pizza crisp. Dollar Tree doesn’t offer that option, so what you get instead is a pizza that has the texture of something that just came out of the microwave.
Nutritionally, this pizza has all the carbs, sodium, calories, and fat you’d expect from a processed food. It also has wheat, soy, and milk.
Nutrition information, ingredients, and heating instructions. (Click to enlarge.)
The Verdict:
Creations Microwaveable Three Meat Pizza isn’t the worst pizza I’ve ever had, but it won’t win any awards, either. The taste is merely passable, and the texture suffers when you heat this in the microwave. There are better microwaveable pizzas out there for more money, or you can get a Totino’s for less money that you can bake in the oven. This DT pizza, though, would not be my first choice in most cases.
