Mad Mutz Mozzarella Laboratory is an Atlantic City-based company specializing in gourmet mozzarella sticks. It was co-founded in 2024 by Michael Steven “Mike” Hauke, a New Jersey restaurateur known for the Tony Boloney’s pizzeria chain, together with his friend Michael Burns. Mad Mutz produces flavored, fresh mozzarella sticks in a variety of creative flavors, using whole ingredients and no fillers. The company’s production facility (dubbed a “mozzarella laboratory”) can churn out tens of thousands of sticks per day – around 20,000 daily as of late 2024, with plans to scale up to 60,000 per day to meet growing demand. What began as a quirky kitchen experiment has quickly grown into a budding business with regional distribution and national ambitions.
Mike Hauke’s journey to Mad Mutz began with an unlikely start in the food business. A Freehold, NJ native with an economics degree from UMass Amherst, Hauke had been working in marketing in New York City before an opportunity drew him to Atlantic City. In 2006, his father enlisted him to help invest in a building near a planned new casino. They intended to rent the ground floor to a bodega for construction workers, but when the casino project stalled, Hauke decided to run the shop himself. Lacking any culinary experience, he opened a small convenience store called Jolly Grocer in 2009, selling basic fare like frozen pizza and chicken fingers. Unsurprisingly, the low-quality approach didn’t last – within months Hauke shut it down and resolved to aim for quality instead.
Hauke taught himself the craft of making fresh pizza dough, homemade tomato sauce, and hand-pulled mozzarella cheese by researching recipes. He reopened the shop later in 2009 as Tony Boloney’s, a quirky pizzeria and sub shop named after a nickname from his Italian grandfather. This pivot to scratch-made, inventive food paid off. As construction resumed on the nearby casino, Tony Boloney’s caught on with local workers and executives. In 2010, Hauke’s creativity gained wider recognition when he won Guy Fieri’s Cheesesteak Battle on Food Network with his over-the-top “Cheesesteak Olé” sandwich. The win brought a surge of interest, and Tony Boloney’s business grew quickly thereafter. Over the next few years, Hauke expanded Tony Boloney’s to new locations in Hoboken and Jersey City, NJ, launched a farmer’s market food truck, and even ran a “Mustache Mobile” food truck for events. By the mid-2010s, he had built a reputation as an unconventional restaurateur known for wild menu creations and a do-it-yourself ethos – all of which set the stage for his next big idea.
One secret behind Tony Boloney’s creative pizzas and subs was Hauke’s dedication to fresh mozzarella. For about 15 years, he had been making his own hand-pulled mozzarella cheese in-house. He didn’t stop at plain cheese, either – Hauke began developing flavored fresh mozzarellas (infused with ingredients like Calabrian chili peppers, pesto, truffle, etc.) to use in his dishes. This tinkering eventually led him to tackle an American comfort-food classic that was typically anything but gourmet: the mozzarella stick.
Traditional frozen mozzarella sticks are made with low-moisture, processed cheese, chosen for its stability in the fryer, but they tend to taste bland and uniform. Hauke saw an opportunity to apply his fresh-cheese know-how to make a more flavorful mozz stick. Early experiments proved challenging – when he first tried frying sticks made from fresh mozzarella, it just turned to mush in the fryer due to the high moisture content. Undeterred, Hauke turned his kitchen into a food science lab, adjusting enzymes, cultures, pH, and technique until he developed a recipe for a fresh, full-moisture mozzarella stick that could survive deep frying and still deliver a satisfying cheese-pull. After considerable trial and error, he succeeded – about eight years ago, he quietly added these improved mozzarella sticks to the Tony Boloney’s menu.
The response from customers was immediate. Hauke’s fresh-made mozzarella sticks, often offered in novel flavors, became one of the most popular items at his pizzerias. Diners began asking how they could buy them to make at home. Hauke recalls fielding inquiries from far and wide – for example, a food truck owner in Canada once saw a video of the mozz sticks and asked to purchase a case of 100 for his business. Hauke obliged (shipping the order at a loss), but that request was a revelation: there was demand beyond his restaurant walls for these unique mozzarella sticks. Soon, food distributors and even supermarket chains were contacting him, expressing interest in carrying the product if he could produce it at scale. This surge of demand and encouragement convinced Hauke that his specialty mozzarella sticks had serious potential as a standalone product line.
By 2019, to pursue this opportunity, Hauke set out to transform his small-scale cheese experiment into a real manufacturing operation. He and his father owned a warehouse building in Atlantic City’s Ducktown neighborhood, and Hauke gradually converted it into a mozzarella production facility – which he playfully named the Mad Mutz Mozzarella Laboratory. Construction was done in fits and starts beginning in 2019, and by 2021 the 2,000-square-foot facility was up and running. With an investment of roughly $500,000, the new lab was able to produce all the fresh mozzarella needed for Tony Boloney’s restaurants and farmers market sales, relieving the burden from the restaurant kitchens. More importantly, it established the foundation for ramping up production far beyond what Hauke alone could handle by hand.
As Hauke started plotting to distribute his mozzarella sticks broadly, he realized he would need a partner to navigate the complexities of scaling a food manufacturing business. He called Michael Burns, a longtime friend and local entrepreneur, for help. Burns, an attorney and real estate professional, had followed Hauke’s mozzarella experiments with interest. When Hauke pitched the idea of spinning off the mozzarella stick venture, Burns immediately saw the promise and agreed to come on board. With Hauke as the culinary lead and Burns providing business direction, the duo formalized the new company – Mad Mutz LLC – and prepared to bring their product to market as a brand separate from Tony Boloney’s.
By late 2024, Mad Mutz’s Atlantic City “lab” was operating full throttle. Using specialized equipment (including cheese-making machines imported from Italy), the facility began producing mozzarella sticks in volume. Initially they produced around 20,000 sticks per day and installed a large freezer capable of storing up to one million sticks at a time. With further optimizations and investment, they projected an eventual capacity of 60,000 sticks a day if demand grew. Mad Mutz was no longer just a back-kitchen hobby – it was a full-fledged production startup ready to supply retailers and restaurants.
Mad Mutz sticks are crafted with an emphasis on freshness and quality. The process starts with fresh, high-quality milk sourced from local dairies that is made into whole-milk mozzarella cheese in Atlantic City. Each mozzarella stick contains a higher ratio of cheese to breading than usual, and there are no preservatives or fillers – just cheese plus basic ingredients like flour, seasonings, and breadcrumbs. The team even bakes their own bread to create house-made breadcrumbs for the coating. It’s a labor-intensive process that takes about 12 hours to produce a batch from scratch. The result is a cheese stick that delivers the kind of rich cheese pull one would expect from fresh mozzarella.
There are about a dozen varieties in total, plus rotating experimental flavors and plans for vegan and gluten-free options. All Mad Mutz sticks are made with no artificial ingredients, and the colors and spices come from natural sources.
Mad Mutz started by offering its mozzarella sticks at all Tony Boloney’s restaurant locations. In November 2024, the team expanded to direct-to-consumer online orders via MadMutz.com, with a waitlist of over 6,000 customers before launch. They also began selling in local supermarkets, including ShopRite, and at Restaurant Depot locations such as the one in Egg Harbor Township. By early 2025, Mad Mutz products were being sold in stores and restaurants across parts of New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and Colorado. With the production facility nearing its 60,000-stick-per-day capacity, the company began planning further expansion to meet growing demand.
