In 1952, a Schuylkill County entrepreneur took a staple of Eastern European church festivals and built an entirely new product in the American grocery aisle by turning his mother’s pierogi recipe into a cultural phenomenon.
Inspired by the popularity of Polish dumplings, Ted Twardzik Sr. bet everyday Americans would love to eat them year-round. He whipped up a batch using his mother Mary’s recipe, walked into his local grocery store, and made his first sale. To honor the original culinary mastermind, he named them Mrs. T’s Pierogies.
More than 70 years later, that local company Ted started from scratch remains the world’s largest producer of frozen pierogies.
National impact
The Mrs. T’s plant in Shenandoah remains the company’s only production facility, producing 600 million pierogies a year.
The company continues to work for the betterment of the community with employees serving its products at local events like Yuengling Lager Jogger and Shenandoah’s Heritage Day and Kielbasa Festival, and donating proceeds to local organizations.
“Our mission is to make people smile when they hear Mrs. T’s,” said company spokeswoman Meghan Heim who attributes the company’s success to the hard work of “Team Pierogi” — its retail and food service employees.
“Pierogies are a classic comfort food in many different cultures. Our hope is that we can carry on the legacy of our founder by creating an emotional bond and sense of nostalgia through our product. Our definition of success is not just ‘more.’ It’s producing a quality product that our consumers can consistently rely on and enjoy every time.”
Truck are loaded with Mrs. T’s Pierogies at the company’s production facility in Shenandoah. (FILE)
Mrs. T’s Pierogies mascot Mr. Pierogyman rides down Main Street in a previous Parade of Nations for the Shenandoah Kielbasi Festival and Heritage Day. (SUBMITTED)
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Truck are loaded with Mrs. T’s Pierogies at the company’s production facility in Shenandoah. (FILE)
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Living legacy
Heim calls making pierogies from scratch “a labor of love.” For millions of families who don’t have the hours to pinch dough, Mrs. T’s became the definitive shortcut by delivering that authentic, homemade taste straight from the grocery freezer.
To cement the dumpling’s place in the American food landscape, the company successfully established National Pierogi Day in 2008, a day celebrated coast-to-coast every Oct. 8 to mark the exact anniversary of the day Ted Twardzik Sr. made his historic first local sale in Shenandoah.
For decades, generations of children across the coal region grew up on Mrs. T’s. As those families migrated away from the Susquehanna Valley over the years, they carried the culinary traditions of NEPA with them, introducing neighbors, friends, and growing families across the country to a distinct taste of their heritage. What began as a hyper-local comfort food has officially become a shared national staple, passed down from one generation to the next.
Sidelight
The story of the American culinary landscape is often told through big corporate conglomerates. But Mrs. T’s proves that an entire national food market can be engineered from a single NEPA town. More than 70 years after that first delivery, the Shenandoah firm continues to be a leader in the American frozen food industry.