Playing in the big leagues.

Home Run Inn is like the natural athlete who has a love and passion for the game. Bigger and more powerful players do not easily intimidate any player with natural talent. When a home run is hit, it doesn't matter how far it goes. As far as the fans are concerned, a home run is a home run no matter how you look at it.

For Woodridge, Ill.-based Home Run Inn, producing great quality pizzas is like hitting the ball into play over and over again. While high-profile sluggers like Kraft Foods and Schwan's Consumer Brands North America swing for the fences every time they come to bat, Home Run Inn has become a fan favorite by playing the game as it should be played as it expands throughout the Midwest and beyond.

"We're a small family business," says Joe Perrino, president of Home Run Inn. "Our focus is totally different than what Kraft and Schwan's may have. It may sound very mundane, but our goals are to produce a great quality product and get it to the customer at a fair price."

Home Run Inn is making new fans by producing pizza like in the good ol' days when sports enthusiasts would chomp down on a hot pizza and a cold beer at the local bar while watching the ballgame after a hard day at work.

While many companies are relying on self-rising crusts, grilled vegetables and exotic cheeses to add excitement to the category, Home Run Inn has developed a loyal following throughout the Midwest by producing its signature version of tried-and-true varieties.

Goat cheese pizza with sun-dried tomatoes? Not for Home Run Inn.

"I think retailers love to see new items, but I can tell you this. After being in the pizza business for over 30 years, it's cheese, it's sausage, it's pepperoni," Joe Perrino says.

Home Run Inn has become a Chicago institution by producing the same high-quality, thin-crust tavern pizza that made it famous with White Sox fans in the first place. In fact, when the Perrino family opened the first Home Run Inn pizza on Chicago's Southwest Side in 1923, it wasn't much more than a corner tavern.

As Perrino explains, "My grandmother and grandfather purchased it basically as a home, and it just happened to have a bar in the front of it."

To support the family, Perrino's grandmother cooked meals everyday to build a trade from the local neigh-borhoods and transform the tavern into more of a restaurant than a local bar. Growth was slow until 1947, when Perrino's father, Nick, married into the family. Nick Perrino, his wife and mother-in-law hit on the unusual idea to make pizzas and give them away--yes, for free--to boost the bar business. It was the first of a string of fresh and innovative ideas for the company.