One Hand on My Pocket (And the Other One's Getting #$%@ Censored): Hot Pockets Pepperoni Pizza (Ep 64)

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It took forty years, but Hot Pockets finally caught up with Darren. This week, the Bros review Hot Pockets Pepperoni Pizza—and for the first time in recorded Froze Bros history, one of your hosts takes his very first bite of the episode's food live on mic.

Digging further in: two Iranian Jewish brothers, Paul and David Merage, founded Chef America in the 1970s with Belgian waffles and a hunch about microwaves. A rebrand in 1983 became a frozen food institution. And a $2.6 billion sale to Nestlé in 2002 made everybody very comfortable. But since 2024, the crisping sleeve is gone. Pour one out.

In the news: Trader Joe's settled a class action lawsuit for $7.4 million over some receipts that showed a few too many credit card digits back in 2019. Nobody was actually harmed. Someone sued anyway. Get your $102 if it's coming to you.

Plus: Google Blogger had impure thoughts about our corn dog post and tried to censor us. The Reverse American cooking method gets its podcast debut. Do you know who Clarence Birdseye, Eggert Johansen, Ettore Boiardi, Nels Lindström, and Rose Totino are? Does Max? And Woodrow Wilson was not, it turns out, president in the 1920s.

Watch this episode

FROST BITES

R.I.P. The Sleeve: The crisping sleeve—that little cardboard sleeve you used to slide your Hot Pocket into before microwaving—wasn’t just packaging. Inside it was a thin metallic film called a susceptor, which absorbed microwave energy and converted it to radiant heat, essentially acting like a tiny oven inside your microwave. It was patented by a Minneapolis inventor named William Brastad in 1981, but the Merage Brothers built their entire dough formula around it. In June 2024, Nestlé eliminated the sleeve, citing sustainability and a reformulated crust. Three thousand three hundred tons of cardboard saved annually. But that’s one less thing for Darren to have experienced for the first time.

Is That a Chocolate Bar in Your Pocket, or Are You Inventing the Microwave?: Paul Merage spent two years perfecting the Hot Pocket dough formula around one big bet: that the microwave was about to be in every American home. He was right. The microwave itself had been around since 1945, when engineer Percy Spencer noticed a chocolate bar melting in his pocket while standing in front of an active radar set. The first models were about six feet tall and weighed more than 750 pounds. By the time Merage was watching microwave ownership climb in the early 1980s, the technology had been waiting nearly 40 years for someone to see what it meant for frozen food. That someone mortgaged his house three times to find out.

The First Woman President: Max got some history wrong. It happens. But he accidentally opened a door to one of the most interesting figures in American political history. When Woodrow Wilson suffered a massive stroke in October 1919, he was left bedridden and partially paralyzed with a year and a half remaining in his second term. (Presidential terms ended in March until 1937.) For those seventeen months, his wife Edith decided what the President would see, hear, and know—reviewing every communication from Cabinet members and Senators, and serving as the sole link between the President and the outside world. She called it "stewardship." Others called her the "Presidentress," the "Secret President," or the "Surrogate President." The Constitution had no provision for a president who became incapacitated. That gap wasn't addressed until 1967 when the Twenty-Fifth Amendment established a formal process for presidential disability and succession. Nearly fifty years after Edith Wilson ran the country. Will we ever actually use it when it's needed though? 🤔

America, Served Frozen: Darren noticed something in this week's Froze Fakes stories. Ettore Boiardi. Rose Totino. Paul and David Merage. The frozen food aisle was largely built by immigrants and their children—people who came to America, saw an opportunity nobody else was chasing, and bet everything on it. That pattern extends well beyond the freezer case: in 2025, more than 46% of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children. The frozen food section is, among other things, a monument to people who arrived here with nothing and yet fed the rest of us.

YOUR COLD CUTS

Darren had his first Hot Pocket this week. Who else has never had one? What's your excuse?

And did you shop at Trader Joe’s in 2019? Are you eligible for a piece of that class action settlement?

Hit us up on the Let's Chill page and let us know!

ENJOYING THE POD?

BUY US A COLD ONE

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