Pizza Delivery… Cook As You Go… A Viable Franchise Concept, or Pie in the Sky?

In the very first post in this blog, I mentioned how I love to prepare, bake, smell, look at, and eat Pizza. Obviously my love of pizza is shared by many people. The owner of one website I have visited, which is about pizza making, enthusiastically proclaims that he has “never met a pizza he didn’t like”. While I can certainly understand his passion for tasting as many pizzas as possible, I have to say that I’ve been disappointed by quite a few.

A Ninety Second Pizza

My favourite type is the Neopolitean. This has a thin fragrant crust which is lightly blistered and charred, crisp on the outside, light but chewy on the inside, thinly spread with sauce and light on toppings.
Arguably a simple Margherita is the best; just tomato sauce, mozzarella cheese and basil with extra virgin olive oil drizzled on top, but of course other toppings can be tasty too. A good Neapolitan pizza is deliciously satisfying, without being heavy.
In my efforts to be the best possible home pizza chef, I have done lots of reading, lots of bakinging and lots of tasting. I have to admit that I have a long way to go before I can match the good, not to mention the best, pizzaioli.

It’s mostly to do with the oven, of course. A domestic oven doesn’t get hot enough. A Neapolitan pizza can be cooked in an 880 degree Fahrenheit oven in 90 seconds. That’s right, 90 seconds! About a minute later, after it has cooled off a little, it is perfect for eating.
Now, compare this with the home delivery pizza. Mostly you will have to wait about a 45 minutes and the pizza will almost certainly be over 30 minutes old by the time you get hold of it. And then there is the pizza itself.. Heavy and stodgy to start with, it now has the added disadvantage of having been cooped-up in its own personal cardboard box sauna for half and hour.
One hungry afternoon I was trying to solve the complex problem of whether to drive to my favourite franchised pizza restaurant and eat-in, or pick-up a takeaway, or order home delivery. The first two options would take me away from what I was doing for about an hour and the third option would result in a pizza I wouldn’t want to eat.
Every problem creates an opportunity, right? Always on the lookout for a new business opportunity, especially if it is a little bit novel, or a little bit crazy, I wondered how best to take advantage of the 90 second cooking time that you get with a “real” pizza oven.
You can get pizza ovens that are highly portable, so my first business concept idea was: Soon after the customer calls, the mobile pizza-cooking team jump in their van and rush to the address. Bursting through the door commando style, they quickly set up the gas-fired oven (which is still warm from their last delivery) and assemble the pizza on a fold-up table, pop it in the oven and cook it while they are distributing the soft drinks, chicken wings, garlic bread, collecting the money and writing the receipt. By the time all that is done, the pizza is ready. They whisk it out of the oven, present it to their customers, fold up the equipment and are out the door racing on to their next customer.
Nah… Too cumbersome, too complicated, too silly.
OK then. How about you take the concept up-market. The team stays for an hour, serves wine and entertains the guests with their pizza-making skills.
Nah… You are going to need a lot of talented well-paid people to make that a success and anyway, those ovens are going to heat the room up more than anybody wants.
OK, how about the pizza oven is permanently installed in the van and when it arrives at the address, the driver jumps into the back, assembles the pizza, bakes it and then delivers it. It’s only 90 seconds, right?
Wait! How about the van has someone in the back assembling and baking the pizza while on the way to the customer’s address?
Now THAT sounds better! It’s an ideal franchise in the making! A fleet of vans criss-crossing the suburbs baking and delivering perfect, bubbling, fragrant, Neapolitan pizza.
Who is taking the customer’s orders?
Ah, here is a chance to introduce some fun technology!
The vans are equipped with satellite tracking and GPS routing. The operator in “Command Control Central” at any one time knows the position of each van, how far they are from their destination and how far they are from the new customer calling-in his order right now.
Why don’t we introduce pay on-line by credit card? That way, the driver doesn’t have to waste time handling money.
Here’s another idea, how about real-time pizza delivery tracking on the franchisee’s web site, so the customer can watch the progress of the van with his pizza on his PC at home? That should elicit a real Pavlovian response!
The franchisor could have one or two operators conducting a fleet of very busy vans, shaking, baking and taking pizzas all over the ‘burbs.
It’s a great candidate for a franchise. There is enough novelty in the mix of technology for managing the operations and the outfitting of the van-based mobile kitchen to make it a bit too daunting for the average privateer start-up. But once all the technology is working in harmony and the design of the mobile kitchen has been fine-tuned and the pilot operation has been running successfully for a while, it would be an easy model to replicate.
It could, in fact be run from a virtual office or a home office and the vans could, I suppose, be independently owned and operated by individual franchisees working within a protected area.
The possibilities and permutations of the core concept are endless, of course and getting the franchise business model just right would be the main challenge.
It’s perfect for the super-control-freak franchisor boss. He can monitor everything from his PC and watch the credit card transactions piling up in his bank account!
…I wonder if it is even possible to assemble and bake a pizza in an 880 degrees Fahrenheit oven in the back of a van while it is driving through a typical suburban environment?
Anyway… Franchise business opportunity ideas are always fun to explore and the more “off the wall” they are, the more fun!
There are plenty of pizza franchises in the Every Franchise Directory. Take a look. None of them are as crazy as the “Take, Bake & Shake” idea I’ve outlined above, they actually work!

Related posts:

1. Naked Pizza: The Trojan Horse of the Pizza Industry
2. An interesting Business Concept
3. Welcome to the Every Franchise Blog
4. Franchisors are Quick to Pick Up on New Technologies