BOTTOM LINE : Good Enough to Eat

Ancient Egyptians pioneered the use of fake food, stashing wax replicas in crypts so the deceased could nosh in the netherworld. Today, Francesco Dorigo, founder of Vista-based Fax Foods, has turned phony food into a $2-million-a-year business.

Dorigo was struggling with an unsuccessful bronze-sculpture business back in 1989 when a Church’s chicken franchisee, tired of the time and expense of replacing display-case food, asked him to create ersatz corn and fowl. “We tried and succeeded,” says Dorigo in his soft Italian accent. “There definitely was a need.”

Church’s became a steady customer and soon other major clients, including Lucky, Wal-Mart and Albertson’s, were buying mock food from Fax. Fax’s sales have tripled in the past two years, with deli display items, including cold-cut trays and sub sandwiches, now outselling the firm’s previous queen of plastic cuisine: “replikale.”

Dorigo’s company has fulfilled some unusual requests: dirty turnips for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, for example, and several thousand spilled strawberry daiquiris, complete with sword picks and dollops of whipped cream, for Whirlpool Corp. refrigerator displays. It sells its facsimiles all around the world, as far away as the U.S. Geological Survey Station deli in Antarctica.

Dorigo says his perfectionism has had some surprising consequences. After re-creating a frozen TV dinner, the company asked him to make it less appealing. “I’ve had several comments along the lines of, ‘It looks good, too good,’ ” Dorigo says.

So good, in fact, that a Price Club-Costco store once accidentally sold one of Fax’s $300 deli trays, a masterpiece of hundreds of individually molded and painted pieces, to an unwitting customer. Lucky service deli merchandising manager John Brass says a few have mysteriously vanished from his counter since their introduction last summer. (Dorigo secures the cheese slices to the tray so that no one, not even the thieves, will end up with a mouthful of orange plastic.)

Over at Albertson’s, “People think they’re real and try to pick meat off them,” reports Liz Burianek, assistant service deli sales manager. “It’s kind of embarrassing.”