Will Gioia - Quality Pizza By-The-Slice/From The Farm
The American pizza industry is enormous. Pizza accounts for 10% of all foodservice sales, for a total of $32 Billion. Each man woman and child eats an average of 46 slices of pizza per year. What is even more staggering is that a growing percentage of the pizza in the United States is industrially produced and highly mediocre.Industrial pizza is made with frozen dough, thick layers of mealy, greasy cheese, cardboard mushrooms, rubbery olives, mystery-meat sausage pellets, greasy neon pepperoni, and ham that more closely resembles plastic than it does pork. What does pizza have to do with agriculture? Well, in the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as in many other cities across America, pizza is being crafted from high-quality ingredients sourced directly from farmers. One of my favorite pizzerias in the Bay Area, Gioia Pizzeria, specializes in pizza-by-the-slice, the segment of the pizza market least friendly to gourmet leanings.
Will Gioia, the owner and chef, of Pizzeria Gioia grew up in Brooklyn, New York and worked as a chef in France before working at several of the top restaurants in the Bay Area including Zuni Café, in San Francisco, and Olivetto, in Oakland, before opening the pizzeria. His goal was to create great pizza with the best ingredients for an affordable price.
At its heart, pizza is a food of few ingredients; dough, sauce, and toppings. Gioia’s ingredients have a well-defined hierarchy of attributes, quality, flavor, and the integrity and the sustainability of the source being the most important. “I get the best product that I can afford from the best people I can find. I make my dough using Giusto organic flour from South San Francisco and Stanislaus tomato puree is my sauce base because they are both outstanding products. The cheeses I buy are made by Grande, a mid-sized company from Wisconsin, and they come to me through a distributor; they are at least twice the price of industrial pizza cheeses but they are easily four times better. My meats come from an artisan producer here in the Bay Area. I buy locally when I can and I only buy from people with whom I want to have a relationship. We have to like each other and we have to respect each other because life is just too short to do it any other way.”
Despite the fact that he buys the best ingredients he can afford while only selling his slices for between $2.50 and $3.00, Gioia Pizzeria turned a profit after only seven months. “I think that the quality of our ingredients and our finished product makes people come back,” Gioia explains. Here is a sobering thought: if ten percent of pizza restaurants in the country would use Will Gioia’s philosophy to source their products, the pizza industry could contribute $3.2 billion dollars to the economies of both domestic agriculture and artisan foods. The market potential for farmer-chef collaborations is evident and the time is right for making the connections required to begin these collaborations.
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posted by Brian J. Kenny @ 11:11 PM
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