We are family

Meet the team behind the mottz!

Decades in the Restaurant Industry

Our family has a long history in the food and restaurant industry, starting in 1968 with our patriarch, Vito Conigliaro, who worked alongside the founder of Roma Foods as their hardest hustling salesman. Vito stayed with Performance Food Group after its acquisition of Roma Foods until he passed away in 2022 and our family has remained loyal to them ever since.

In 1991, Vito’s son and our company’s namesake, Joe Conigliaro, took over a little pizza restaurant outside of Richmond, Virginia named Sergio’s where he would eventually meet his wife, Cynthia, and raise two daughters together. The four still manage Sergio’s and run all aspects of Joey D’s operations to this day.

Our family has been hand-crafting our famous cheese appetizers since 2012.

Obsessed with quality

While Sergio’s grew and became a local favorite, our family was obsessed with making every menu item as awesome as it could be. Unfortunately every mozzarella stick we tried didn’t live up to our standards. They were all too small, exploded in the fryer and left our customers with little greasy bread shells. So in 2012 we took matters into our own hands, literally, and started hand-breading, cutting and frying our own mozzarella sticks in-house. It didn’t take long for our customers to start referring to them as “logs” as they outweighed the competition in both size and quality.

As the mozzarella logs grew in popularity, we could see that other local restaurants could benefit from better, hand-made frozen cheese products, so we set up shop in a commercial kitchen, growing from a little 200 square foot space to a 10,000 square foot custom cheese product facility. The growth of Joey D’s cheese products is simple: whole milk mozzarella, all natural ingredients and a precise freezing process and preparation instructions that ensure their ooey-gooey goodness no matter where they’re served.