This man made a better mozzarella stick. Can he make millions of them?

Mozzarella sticks, whether from your grocer’s freezer or at your local bowling alley, are pretty much all the same: low-moisture, part-skim cheese, coated in breadcrumbs. Toss them in a fryer and they’re done.

Then there are Mike Hauke’s mozz sticks. Mad Mutz is made from fresh mozzarella, so it contains fewer ingredients than most commercial counterparts — no fillers or oils within the cheese — and since the whole-milk cheese and the coatings are flavored, they taste like something, not just a bland tube of molten cheese.

But fresh mozz isn’t an ideal candidate for long, hot baths in the deep fryer, which is why Hauke’s path to a better mozzarella stick has stretched further than you may think.

For 15 years, Hauke has made hand-pulled mozzarella at Tony Boloney’s, his Atlantic City-based sub and pizzeria chain. He shreds it on pizzas and layers it inside his wild sandwich creations, like the one whose name we can’t print here (with beer-battered chicken, smoked bacon, cheddar, and Fritos sprinkled on top). It can be bought, balled, and wrapped in plastic, at his Tony’s Farm truck, which shows up at a handful of Jersey farmer’s markets. He also makes flavored mozzarellas, like Calabrian chili, pesto, smoked, and truffle, available on Goldbelly. Vegetarians can eat it, too, since Hauke’s mozz is not made from rennet (which traditionally comes from the stomach of calves).

When Hauke first tried making sticks from his fresh mozzarella, “it just turned to crap in the fryer,” he said. “The real simple answer is, fresh mozzarella is too moist. Customers were complaining it’s droopy, and I’m saying, ‘Yeah, it’s fresh mozzarella.’”

Hauke geeked out in his home kitchen, balancing enzymes, cultures, pH levels, and heat, until he created a tasty, full-flavored stick made with fresh mozzarella that comes out of the fryer with a satisfying cheese pull. He began adding them to Tony Boloney’s menus about eight years ago.

Now, Mad Mutz is on the verge of wide distribution throughout the Jersey Shore and beyond, with the sticks expected to reach grocery stores in Philadelphia and its suburbs soon. Direct shipping to consumers will begin this week, while restaurants can order them through Restaurant Depot. Hauke is hoping to take the brand national.

Mad Mutz will cost more than most other sticks — about $9 or $10 for a box of five in stores, or roughly $2 a stick, Hauke said, but “they are massive — three sticks really are comparable to a normal order of five.”

The sticks come in 12 flavors: The Gaucho is chimichurri-flavored, with a garlic-and-herb crust. There’s the Lucifer, whose mozzarella is made with 10 kinds of hot peppers and whose charcoal crust, supposedly rated at 2.9 million Scoville units, will “burn your face off,” Hauke said. The Truffler has truffles in the cheese, the batter, and the panko crust. The Unicorn comes in various colors and has a crust that includes edible glitter.

But there’s “no artificial anything,” Hauke said. “No scary ingredients.” (Most of his varieties are just cheese, flour, water, vegetable oil, salt, modified food starch, sugar, and baking powder.)

Hauke was satisfied making and selling mozzarella sticks at his restaurants. Then, about a decade ago, the owner of a food truck in Canada saw Tony Boloney’s sticks in a video and asked to buy 100. Hauke said he lost money on the shipping, but it sold him on the idea of producing them in volume.

Hauke converted a warehouse building that he and his father owned in Atlantic City’s Ducktown neighborhood, 15 minutes from Tony Boloney’s, into a factory he now calls the Mad Mutz Mozzarella Laboratory. Construction started, in dribs and drabs, in 2019. By 2021, after he said he spent about $500,000, the factory could make all the mozzarella for the Tony Boloney’s shops and farmer’s markets.

But if Hauke wanted to put Mad Mutz in stores and restaurants, he needed to ramp up production significantly. “I was in way over my head,” Hauke said. “I thought there’s no way that we can make this economically feasible,” Hauke said. “That’s when I called Michael.”

Michael Burns, a longtime friend, lawyer, and entrepreneur, listened to Hauke lay out the interest, the marketplace, the challenges, and the potential of creating a new brand apart from Tony Boloney’s.

“He’s saying, ‘There’s enough here between the branding and the product to blow this up nationally,’” Burns said. “I’m listening. I’m just like, ‘Yeah, we’ll do it.’”

“Michael is basically the part I’ve always needed,” Hauke said. “I don’t need someone to make pizza or get staff excited and motivated or delegate responsibilities in the kitchen. I really do need a business person that understands guardrails. He has the philosophy of, ‘If I say I’m gonna do it, it is absolutely done.’”

Now Mad Mutz is making 20,000 mozzarella sticks a day and can store about a million in a freezer that arrived this month.

Hauke, 44, grew up in Freehold, N.J., studied economics at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, and moved to New York City, where he worked in marketing.

In 2006, his father, who owned buildings in Atlantic City, asked him to partner in an investment into a three-story clapboard house that was the lone building on a block near the planned $2 billion Revel casino in the South Inlet. There were apartments upstairs and they thought they’d lease the ground floor to a bodega operator who would feed the construction workers. But the casino project was mothballed, and the ground floor sat empty.

As work restarted in 2009, Hauke and his college roommate opened it as a bodega called Jolly Grocer, “selling frozen garbage, chicken fingers, subpar pizza, and burgers,” Hauke said. “I had no experience in the food business. No one wanted to teach me the recipes, and food suppliers didn’t want to sell me fresh stuff.”

Within months of opening, Hauke shut it down, and decided to aim for quality as a restaurant. He looked up recipes for dough (including his own yeast), mozzarella, and sauce, and bought fresh chicken and beef. He reopened as Tony Boloney’s — an affectionate nickname his Italian grandfather used. (“Hey, little Tony Boloney! Get upstairs and wash your face! Stop listening to the radio!”)

As nearby construction resumed later in 2009, Tony Boloney’s caught on with the casino executives and workers. In 2010, business exploded after Hauke won Guy Fieri’s Cheesesteak Battle with what is now one of his top sandwiches, the cheesesteak olé, for which 10-spice sirloin steak is cooked in Mexican seasonings, fried onions, Jack cheese, and buttermilk-chipotle cheese sauce.

Hauke opened locations in Hoboken and Jersey City, started the farmer’s market truck as well as a food truck (the Mustache Mobile), and during the pandemic, sold DIY kits.

These days, Hauke is all in at the Mozzarella Laboratory, set amid a neighborhood and across from a playground. He brings his sons, age 5 and 8, to “work,” putting Mad Mutz stickers on shipping boxes and teaching them math. Burns’ children — ages 15, 17, and 20 — have been helping with inventory and bookkeeping.

Burns thinks that because the Mad Mutz sticks are offered in different flavors, they make up a new appetizer category.

People have to try them first, however. As they are rolled out in stores, Hauke plans to set up a table with a deep-fryer and “personally be there shoving mozzarella sticks down people’s throats.”

This time, it’s Burns applying the brakes. “We’re going to start slow: crawl before we walk, walk before we run,” he said.