Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, March 24, 1995                   TAG: 9503240145
SECTION: BUSINESS                    PAGE: A-9   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

IN BUSINESS

LOUISA - Louisa Manufacturing Co., a girls' dressmaker for 34 years, is going out of business and sending 200 workers to the unemployment line.

The company succumbed to increased competition, a shrinking number of retail buyers and a society where fewer young girls wear dresses, said Joseph Parrish, general manager and vice president.

``Years ago, every girl wore a dress to school. But now they want to go to school looking like a frump,'' Parrish said. ``What do they call that style - grunge? Grunge has killed me.''

Parrish said employees were notified Wednesday of the closing.

- Associated Press

Union Camp opens new recycling plant

FRANKLIN - More than 150 state and local leaders turned out Thursday for Union Camp Corp.'s dedication of its $100 million paper-recycling plant.

Gov. George Allen praised the company for its expansion and said increasing jobs in the state is his top priority.

``That is what is No. 1 in my time,'' he said at Wednesday's ceremony. The new plant hired about 80 people.

The plant will convert more than 400 tons of office waste paper a day to 300 tons of bleached pulp, the main ingredient in white paper.

The pulp is used for envelopes, tablets, forms, paper for book printing and other products at Union Camp's paper and lumber mill outside Franklin.

- Associated Press

Pizza Hut touts crust `revolution'

Pizza Hut on Thursday announced an innovation it contends will ``revolutionize'' the pizza-restaurant world: a pizza crust stuffed with an outer ring of mozzarella cheese. The new product, to be called ``Stuffed Crust Pizza,'' will be introduced Sunday in the chain's 8,600 U.S. units. A $45 million advertising campaign will begin April 1, during the NCAA basketball Final Four weekend.

With $4.6 billion in 1994 sales, Pizza Hut is the dominant, though struggling, player in the $18 billion pizza-restaurant market in the United States, with a 25 percent share.

Domino's Pizza and Little Caesars each has market share half that of Pizza Hut, but more than 50 percent of all pizza sales still go to mom-and-pop restaurants and regional chains.

``The American consumer has been returning to the hamburger because beef prices are down,'' said Roy Burry, a securities analyst for Oppenheimer & Co. ``The stuffed crust gives Pizza Hut a real leg up on the other chains and the mom-and-pops, because a lot of people don't eat pizza crust because they don't like it.''

The new product is made by placing a necklace of mozzarella string cheese around the pizza-crust rim and folding over the dough. That forms a circlet of cheese that melts when the pie is in the oven.

- The New York Times