Pizza With a Point
Jeff Leach is one of those people who can talk about healthful eating and the mechanics of human digestion and the evils of the industrial-food supply — and keep talking long after you’ve zoned out. This is why he decided to get into the pizza business: both because he has a lot to say and because “pizza” is more likely to hold your attention than, say, “gluten-free” or “gastrointestinal system.” In 2006, he and his business partner, Randy Crochet, began what Leach calls their journey toward making a more healthful pizza, tinkering for two and a half years and spending $750,000 on research and experimentation. Now, having built a successful local business called Naked Pizza, they’re on the verge of what would be a major expansion: with a couple of big partners, they plan to sell franchises across the country, as many as 200 by the end of this year.
Leach and Crochet met in New Orleans, which is not known for healthful cuisine. Leach, an archaeologist by trade, began researching biology and food after his young daughter came down with diabetes some years earlier, but neither he nor Crochet, a mortgage broker and real estate developer, had any experience in the restaurant business, and neither knew much about marketing. Nevertheless, they hit on the idea of making a point about junky fast food by creating an appealing alternative. Looking to work with a main course widely considered emblematic of bad American eating habits, they settled on pizza. “It’s nothing more than a donut with tomato sauce,” Leach likes to say.
Hiring biologists and food technologists, they devised a crust made of 12 whole grains, used low-fat skim mozzarella and a tomato sauce with “no additives, preservatives, colorants or weird chemicals or molecules of any kind.” Their approach also includes probiotics (“health-giving bacteria that live in our guts”) and prebiotics (“special grit-free fibers”). Not surprisingly, Leach suggests the results also happen to taste better than processed alternatives. (The handful of reviews on Yelp.com seem to agree.) They set up their delivery business in a small building near Tulane University, naming it the World’s Healthiest Pizza. “Stupidly,” Leach says, “we just called it what it was.” The name, he said, seemed to make some people nervous or skeptical: “People thought it was going to taste like the side of a tree.”
Robbie Vitrano, the founder of a New Orleans branding agency called Trumpet, noticed one of the pizza boxes in a client’s office. “On the box was essentially a dissertation on how food is processed in your lower intestine,” he recalls. “I thought, Well, they’re either geniuses or absolutely insane.” Vitrano’s firm has in recent years worked with a lot of smaller local companies seeking national audiences (like a performance-apparel company called thriv and a self-explanatory product called Bruise Relief) and has become what Leach calls his “brand muse.” This means Vitrano has helped the pizza-makers serve up a more palatable pitch — starting with a name that suggests additive-free naturalness in a more fun way.
Vitrano also encouraged the use of social media, in line with the idea that Naked Pizza might be better served by dialogue than dissertation. “Not everybody is ready for this,” Vitrano says of the more elaborate elements of Naked Pizza’s thinking. Leach and Crochet have even put up a billboard advertising their Twitter handle. This doesn’t mean they backed off their more idealistic goals. If you want to read a lengthy essay, complete with journal citations, about the company’s philosophy of eating, it’s on the company blog. Entries run as long as 1,400 words. But if you just want some pizza, that’s also fine. “You can dig as deep as you want,” Leach says, “or not dig at all.”
Earlier this year, with its local business starting to click, the company decided to throw itself into consideration for the Mark Cuban Stimulus Plan, a sort of open call to startups and small businesses that Cuban, the famous entrepreneur, would consider investing in. This led to a deal giving Cuban the territorial rights for Naked Pizza franchises in Texas. The online publicity around this attracted a swarm of investment inquiries, and Naked Pizza was pondering a deal with a privately owned holding company with interests in a range of businesses, to roll out Naked Pizza everywhere else.
Leach acknowledges that selling franchises is a totally different business from selling pizza, but he insists that the Naked Pizza formula can travel. The blended flour will be made in New Orleans and shipped to the franchises, and everything else can be kept consistent by way of the practices used by any franchise operation. Leach talks of ending up with 1,000 locations or more — “tentacles in every community,” as he puts it. Aside from the blog and the Twitter feed, he says he intends to continue to communicate via pizza box: “We’ll use this pizza to have a larger conversation with you about the food supply.”
