Mass Pizza Diversification

Pizza may well be America’s most popular import. It’s ideal for an inexpensive date, for watching a ball game, or for feeding seven little girls gathered in the basement for a slumber party. But data gathered by Food Beat, Inc., Wheaton, IL, from the nation’s top- 200 restaurant chains during the first half of 2007 indicate that pizza no longer has to be a simple meal. Today, pizza varies from region to region, and from neighborhood pizza parlor to major chain. And, although the venerable Margherita and the timeless pepperoni and cheese won’t soon disappear from menus, specialty pizzas topped with everything from artichoke hearts to lobster are capturing the hearts of American diners.

Crusts now regularly vary from thin and crispy to thick and chewy, and pizza serves as a culinary canvas for innovative product developers. Many of the nation’s top-200 venues are menuing pizzas that tempt diners with gourmet cheeses and nontraditional toppings in scrumptious signature pies able to satisfy the evolving American palate.

To wit: California Pizza Kitchen offers up a pizza of goat cheese and roasted red and yellow peppers, grilled Japanese eggplant, mozzarella cheese and caramelized onions. Gordon Biersch menus a vegetarian pizza of handtossed, oven-fired, house-made dough topped with sun-dried-tomato pesto, artichokes, mushrooms, spinach and Roma tomatoes. Uno Chicago Grill has a four-cheese flatbread pizza with Muenster, goat, Parmesan and mozzarella cheeses, as well as basil pesto and plum tomatoes on either a chewy or thin-and-crispy organic flatbread crust.

Diners at Bertucci’s can select from a menu of pizza toppings that boasts zucchini, eggplant, black olives, artichokes, peppers and garlic—all roasted—as well as fresh or caramelized onions, mushrooms, broccoli florets, diced plum tomatoes, fresh peppers, sundried tomatoes, anchovies, pesto sauce, ricotta or feta cheese, sweet Italian sausage, pepperoni, rosemary ham, and pancetta.

Regional and ethnic takes abound, as well. Tumbleweed Southwest Grill menus a pizza with a Southwestern flavor profile that sports refried beans, spicy beef, tomatoes, green onions, jalapeño peppers, black olives and enchilada sauce. Schlotzsky’s Deli offers a Thai Chicken Pizza, described on the menu as grilled chicken breast, mozzarella cheese, basil pesto, Thai peanut sauce, julienne carrots, cilantro and green onions on a sourdough crust. And Rock Bottom Brewery’s Aegean Pizza is topped with such specialties as prosciutto, kalamata olives, feta cheese, sun-dried tomatoes, roasted garlic, fresh rosemary and artichoke hearts, and is served on a Parmesan crust with four cheeses.

With such specialty toppings gracing menus, even a die-hard pepperoni-and-cheese person might take a dining chance.

Pizza is the kind of food that people associate with their childhoods and with their hometowns, notes Jimmy Simonte, director of new product marketing, Domino’s Pizza. “Pizza has a very strong connection with people’s pizza heritage—what they grew up with and what they have associated with a classic pizza,” he says. Although specialty pizzas are exciting and appealing to a large number of diners, he adds, there remains a place for tradition.

The result is both an opportunity and a challenge for product and menu developers attempting to meet the demands of a persnickety public.

Simonte adds: “This is another area where the world is fairly segmented and there are definite trends. Our hand-tossed crust is something that has been universally successful—it’s a hand-stretched dough that’s thin but not ultra-thin, and is a crispy, fresh-dough product. But, regionally, other doughs and crust types are becoming successful. We have a thin and crispy and what we call our Brooklyn-style crust, which is in between. It’s the fresh dough, stretched thinner than our traditional hand-tossed.”

Simonte says this thinner crust appeals particularly to native New Yorkers who, wherever they ultimately land, continue to crave the delicate, sidewalk-walking friendly and foldable pizza associated with one of the great pizza cities of America.

Although today’s pizzas come on a variety of crusts topped with an international cast of toppings, the classic Margherita—with its Italian-flag colors of green (basil), white (mozzarella) and red (tomatoes), named after Queen Margherita of Savoy in the late 1800s—retains a solid following. Despite all the interest currently being generated by specialty pizzas with bold and innovative flavor profiles, notes Maurizio Mazzon, executive chef and vice president, Il Fornaio, Corte Madera, CA, sometimes the most simple (and exquisite) remains the best.

“The most popular pizza is the pizza Margherita,” says Mazzon. “This pizza is just pizza dough, tomato sauce, fresh mozzarella and basil. The simplicity of the flavors is the No. 1 sell.

“You can make a pizza and put everything on top,” Mazzon continues, “but you have to be careful because if you put too many things on top, you can have too many flavors and you don’t taste the tomato sauce anymore. I always have these people that are looking for a different flavor, but in the end you’ve got to go back to the basics—tomato sauce, mozzarella, basil.”

At LaRosa’s, the team employs a method that is not only effective, but fun for both product developers and diners. Firth says that when the company is searching for a new flavor profile, it watches industry trends and carefully reviews all customer feedback. But, in the end, much of their best information comes from playing in the research kitchen, attached to one of the restaurant’s dining rooms, with ideas generated by the customers.

“We go out into the dining room and talk to our customers, asking, ‘What would you like? What would you like to see on the menu?’” says Firth. “And then we’ll develop several things and take them right out to our guests in the dining room.”

After gathering feedback, they collect the comments and the leftover pizza, go back to the kitchen for a bit of tweaking, then return to the dining room with what they hope will be an improved product. 

The method has met with some success, notes Firth. The chain’s Chicken Alfredo Pizza—menued as chicken with diced Roma tomatoes, spinach, Alfredo sauce and a four-cheese blend on choice of crust—was the direct result of a customer’s request for a pizza with something other than a red sauce. To fill that demand, the chain experimented with three new pizzas featuring a ranch, an Alfredo, and a garlic-butter pesto sauce. The Alfredo was a clear winner.

Il Fornaio also doesn’t rely exclusively on suggestion cards or creative outbursts from R&D when it wants to intrigue diners. Mazzon says the profile for one of the chain’s most enduringly popular pizzas came from a young woman homesick for the pizza of her hometown in Italy. Whenever the young woman visited his Coronado, CA, restaurant, Mazzon would make a special pizza without tomato sauce, baked first with fresh mozzarella and mushrooms, then topped with fresh baby arugula, sliced prosciutto, shaved Parmesan and a drizzle of truffle oil.

Other guests began requesting the pizza and, today, the Pizza Christina remains one of the most popular items on the menu. “All our pizzas have tomato sauce, and I thought it was very good to have one pizza without tomato sauce,” Mazzon says. “It’s a very good, popular pizza and it’s a very different pizza...”

Simonte says he thinks of a flavor profile as a blending of ingredients and levels, and adds that the company has developed a sophisticated method for developing what diners want to order. “We have developed an ideation and context development process to identify consumer needs and product opportunities,” he says. “From that development process, we identify product needs and work with our culinary staff to prototype and bring those ideas to fruition.”

Simonte points to the need to cater to more-adventurous diners interested in something beyond pepperoni or olives. “There was probably a time, 5 or 10 years ago, when if you asked somebody what a chipotle was, they would scratch their head,” he says. “Now, everyone knows that’s a pepper, and they know the flavor profile. People are becoming much more daring.”

But Simonte’s words don’t equate to a license to rebuild a pizza menu from scratch. “We still sell 60% of our pizza with just pepperoni today,” he notes. “That’s the same number we did many years ago. There’s a fine line between trial and error... There are some people who want to try a lot of different flavor profiles, and also a lot who don’t want to experiment at all.”

Kate Harrigan is a freelance writer and editor specializing in food and travel. She lives in Massachusetts. Food Beat, Inc., based in Wheaton, IL, tracks menu activity at the top-200 U.S. restaurant chains. It provides the industry with in-depth menu analyses and related trend information.