Joanna Cosgrove02.15.10
The venerable pizza has come a long way since its humble Italian beginnings. But whether it’s deep dish or thin crust, meat lovers or Hawaiian style, one thing is clear: pizza is about the furthest you can get from health food fare. It’s also something the founders of New Orleans, LA-based NakedPizza set out to change. Imagine a twelve-grain crust fortified with probiotics and prebiotics, topped with all natural sauce, cheese, meat and vegetables. The result? According to the pizza aficionado company founders, it’s not just good pizza, it’s “damn good” pizza. And it would appear the quest for good tasting yet healthy pizza is a sentiment shared by a growing number of consumers, as the company’s franchises have steadily branched out of its southern U.S. home base and into new market territories around the country—a movement company founders Jeff Leach and Randy Crochet hope will kick-start a grassroots movement to impact public policy regarding our nation’s food supply.
An archeologist by trade, Mr. Leach has long focused on cooking technology, its evolution over time and how food affects human physiology. He began looking into prebiotics about five years ago after developing an interest in intestinal health—specifically food and its impact on intestinal flora—when his daughter was experiencing health issues related to type I diabetes. He even authored and published a handful of papers on prebiotics from an evolutionary perspective. “I was fascinated with how food modulates the human microbiome, how it dials up and down the presence of good and bad bacteria [and] I found evidence that people have been consuming beneficial prebiotics for two million years,” he said, noting that his most current article regarding prebiotics and their significant role in human evolution will be published in a forthcoming issue of the British Journal of Nutrition.
Following hurricane Katrina, Mr. Leach went to New Orleans and partnered with his investment banker friend, Randy Crochet, in an effort to create jobs. “We decided to get into the fast food business, and decided to test what is arguably one of the unhealthiest fast foods in the world that we all love: pizza, a conveniently formatted disc of dough,” he recalled. “We wanted to develop a pizza that, number one, demonstrated that pizza doesn’t have to be unhealthy. “What many people are doing right now is taking an unhealthy pizza and throwing organic tomatoes on it and calling it healthy. We tried to avoid that whole health ‘halo.’”
Focus on Ingredients
The first thing the pair did was reduce the amount of highly processed wheat in the crust and add back in multigrains like buckwheat, amaranth and quinoa, which not only introduced dietary fiber but also beneficial phytochemicals and vitamins. “Our goal was to introduce a diversity of fiber because the average American only consumes both a small quantity and a small variety of fiber,” Mr. Leach said. “We wanted to create a crust that delivered a variety of physical and chemical fermentable substrates for the intestinal flora. A food that delivers a greater diversity of physical and chemical structures of fibers will do better than one that just delivers a monofiber in quantity. If you’re going to get 30 grams of fiber a day, it’s better to get it from five sources than one. In our case, it’s 12.”
They also removed the sugar and reduced the oil and sodium, creating a fewer calorie pizza with less fat and less sodium. Then they added the Orafti prebiotic Synergy 1. In terms of the dosage, Mr. Leach said there’s 2.5 grams of Synergy 1 per slice. They also added heat-resistant probiotic spores called GanedenBC30 from Ganeden Biotech. “Our product offering at the pizza level is 100% natural,” Mr. Leach pointed out. “There’re no additives, preservatives or freaky chemicals of any kind. Our meats are 100% natural—no antibiotics or hormones—but they are not organic. The end product is what amounts to the world’s first carry-out functional pizza.
“If Darwin were to design a pizza based on the principles of evolutionary medicine, this is a pizza Darwin would eat and we do it all in a sneaky way, i.e. it tastes great.”
After the pizza formulation was perfected, then came the decision on how to offer it to the public. “We didn’t want to get into the pizzeria business because that would involve expanding our menu to suit the sit-down experience. No matter how hard I try, I can’t make cheesecake healthy,” Mr. Leach chortled. “So we copied the business model of nationally branded pizza chains like Papa John’s and Domino’s and went the small store, limited menu, delivery and carryout route but offered a different product. We had to do it all without violating what people expected from a pizza – it had to be round, it had to be in a box, and had to have a reasonable price point (which is why we didn’t go organic) because we wanted our product to be attractive to the 66% of American customers would eat.”
From day one, he continued, they approached this entire business as an R&D project. “It wasn’t a couple of yahoos that opened a pizza place, hoping it would work; it was a very methodically researched and developed project,” he said. “We spent three years developing the combination of grains getting exactly what we wanted. Our pizzas our comparable in price to a Papa John’s but what we think we’re onto is tapping into a pizza that people will eat ten to twenty years from now, but there’s enough to support the business now as it stands.
“We tested our concept in the worst health market in America—New Orleans. If we can get it to work here, we can get it to work anywhere in the world. We opened up our test unit three years ago and we did very well.”
NakedPizza recently partnered with Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, and the Kraft Group (not Kraft Foods) owners of the New England Patriots, which helped fund the hiring of design and operation staff, enabling the roll out of the brand into other territories in America. “We’ll have 30-40 new units open up in North America this year and as many as 150 units next year,” Mr. Leach confirmed.
Big Picture Goals
NakedPizza’s healthy agenda is targeted to swell beyond just healthy fast food. For now, the team has extrapolated the healthy pizza dough into breadsticks, but there’s much, much more on the drawing board. The development of a lifestyle brand called LiveNaked is already in the works.
“It’s a concept that essentially encourages consumers to think before they bite, pay attention to what’s going on in the world, ask questions about your foods, your coffee beans and where your shirt came from. It’s about getting back to where we all came from and we all came into this world barefoot and naked,” said Mr. Leach. “LiveNaked is about getting back to the essence of what it means to be natural and live in the natural world—it’s a message we want to make palatable to 66% of Americans, we didn’t want to make it high brow, where organic has kind of gone. So we toned it down to reach average, Middle America.”
The plan is to open 1000-1200 NakedPizzas in North America with the hope that the pizza will be a conduit for customer conversation. “We’re a social media marketing company that happens to sell pizza,” said Mr. Leach. “Once we have those millions of customers, we’ve effectively created the world’s largest grassroots health organization. Once we have that in our hands we’re going to use that influence to affect public policy—with regards to food supply, how we live, how we expect to live—and that stroke can create AARP-like power around fast food while in the process demonstrate that fast food isn’t going away. It’s a part of our culture.”
The big plan for NakedPizza’s functional pizza is to effectively rebrand fast food as part of the solution, not part of the problem. “It is possible,” said Mr. Leach. “We’re making a business case that will move the needle beyond just talking about putting calories on a menu board and getting rid of trans fats. That’s like moving the deck chairs around on the Titanic. We’re not going anywhere except down.
“We need to create an Al Gore moment for fast food through scale,” Mr. Leach continued. “If we’re only half right, I think we’re still sitting on the opportunity to make a difference that business is going to have to pay attention and follow us.”
