US town held funeral for nearly 30,000 pizzas for a very important reason

While some people might raise eyebrows at people holding extravagant funerals for their pets, this man hosted one for his pizzas.

Many years ago, Ilario 'Mario' Fabbrini moved to the US after fleeing Yugoslavia and made a home for himself and his wife, Olga, in Ossineke, Michigan.

Upon moving there, Fabbrini started a business making and selling frozen pizzas.

Fast forward 10 years and he had one of the largest pizza factories in the country and was producing as many as 45,000 pizzas a week.

Papa Fabbrini Pizzas produced millions of pizzas while in business (Getty Stock)

While everything was going swimmingly for Fabbrini, he hit a bump in the road when the FDA contacted him in 1973 to inform him that the plant that produced the canned mushrooms he used as a topping on his pizzas had undergone tests that found presence of botulism.

With this in mind, he was forced to recall thousands of his products - 30,000 pizzas, to be more precise.

This is said to have cost Fabbrini about $30,000 to him, and a retail cost of about $60,000, ClickOnDetroit reports, making it the largest pizza recall in history at the time.

There were multiple botulism scares in the US in the 1970s (Getty Stock)

In light of the thousands of pizzas he had to throw into the trash, Fabbrini decided to make an event out of it - and so the Great Pizza Funeral of Michigan was born.

On March 5, 1973, the business owner dumped the pies into an 18-foot deep hole which Michigan Governor William Milliken attended, even giving a homily at the so-called funeral.

As to why Fabbrini hosted the affair instead of discretely discarding the pizza, it's thought that he did it for publicity, as well as to show accountability during the botulism scare.

While the event has gone down as a slice of history (see what I did there?), it didn't actually need to happen as it was later revealed that the FDA was wrong about the mushrooms in question as they didn't have botulism after all.

Because of the mix-up and the produce - as well as the money - he lost from the mistake, Fabbrini went on to sue them and went on to win over $200,000 in damages.

The pizza company continued to thrive in the years that followed, but eventually went out of business in the 1980s.

Fabbrini long outlived its closure and is said to have only died last year at the age of 91.

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