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For most of eternity, pizza—or at least, really good pizza—has been the domain of restaurants and take-out joints. There is, after all, a reason why there are pizza chains named 800 Degrees and Blaze Pizza. At-home pizza ovens, by contrast, were reserved for the minted few who had the space and thousands of dollars required to install a commercial pizza oven in their kitchen or construct a stone pizza oven in their yard. Like Jimmy Kimmel. The rest of us were stuck with conventional ovens and the sad soft crust of the dreaded microwave.
That all changed about a decade ago with the emergence of portable and effective outdoor pizza ovens for the masses, led by U.K. direct-to-consumer brands Ooni and Gozney. Now, the U.S. home pizza market alone is projected to hit $751.6 million by 2030, and it has reached a significant enough scale that media outlets have been hyping where people can get the best holiday deals to land one of their very own. It’s also become a mature enough market that real brand distinctions have emerged.
Just as with Nike, Adidas, and New Balance in sneakers, or Apple, Samsung, and Google in mobile phones, these home pizza ovens are remarkably close in tech specs, but each has quite distinct brand styles and personalities. Initially, the product itself was the curiosity (Who needs a pizza oven? Do I need a pizza oven? Let’s buy a pizza oven!). Now pizza ovens are in their brand era. Housewares giants Walmart, Cuisinart, Breville, and Ninja have all entered the chat, but the three with arguably the most momentum as brands are Ooni, Gozney, and Solo Stove’s Pi.
Forget delivery, the pizza wars have come home, and each brand is approaching this next phase with its own recipe. The one you prefer not only says something about you as a person, but also maybe as a businessperson.
THE INNOVATOR
Launched in 2012 as a Kickstarter by married couple Darina Garland and Kristian Tapaninaho, Ooni is widely credited with launching the outdoor pizza oven market in the accessible $500 price range. As a brand, it has relied on the first-mover status and its product innovation. Earlier this year, the Edinburgh, Scotland-based company released its first-ever electric pizza oven model called the Ooni Volt 12. “We created the product category,” says Garland. “So, making sure that [as a brand], we are still within that space, innovating and staying ahead of the game. One of the key brand strategy differences is that, when we started, we had to educate the world about pizza ovens. The shift in brand strategy [went] from why a pizza oven to why Ooni?”
To answer that question, Ooni’s strategy includes working with both acclaimed chefs and food influencers, such as Nancy Silverton and Gil Meller, and the brand’s YouTube channel is a mix of product-hero videos, recipes, and demonstrations. But Garland says that perhaps the most important aspect of the brand’s growth has been its own community of users.
“In the beginning, we felt like our Facebook community was taking on the role of customer support for us,” says Garland. “There’s a real generosity that absolutely permeates the community even when you’re completely [a] novice and just getting started.”
The brand has worked to engage with that hardcore user community when it’s developing new products and ideas. After the success of its 2019 cookbook, Cooking with Fire, one of those notions was to extend Ooni into more pizza-related products, beyond tools like cutters and peels and into the grocery aisle. In 2021, Ooni launched a grocery line that includes gourmet pizza sauce, durum wheat semolina flour, and an array of toppings.
“Engaging the community earlier has been a great tool for building the brand by so nurturing that community,” says Garland. “We’re also a B Corp, and that’s quite a big part of our strategy. Actually, it’s not really a strategy, more just being a company we want to be proud of.”
THE EXTENSION
Solo Brands introduced its Pi Oven brand in 2022, adding it to a full complement of outdoor-related products including its namesake Solo Stove fire pits, Terraflame outdoor furniture, Chubbies shorts, Oru Kayak, and Isle.
As head of partnerships at Solo Stove, Tyler DiGiovanni may be getting more attention recently for the brand’s Snoop Dogg stunt, but his real passion is pizza. He says that even though the Pi pizza oven brand only launched in March 2022, by the end of last year, pizza oven sales accounted for roughly 10% of Solo Stove’s roughly $400 million in revenue last year.
“We don’t like to call ourselves the firepit company,” says DiGiovanni. “If you’ve gone to our website lately, you’ll see we do a lot more than just firepits nowadays; the one common [thread] of what we do is fire. Fire pits, pizza ovens, and now furniture that involves sitting around the fire. We’re an outdoor lifestyle brand.”
Because it’s not the main player of its brand portfolio just yet, Solo is taking the slow and steady approach. It has launched a full line of pizza accessories and a new cast iron cookware set, but DiGiovanni says that despite the strong brand equity in Solo, there is still plenty of work to be done on the brand side for Pi. “Where we lack is more of the content side,” he says, noting that the company will be investing “in being a recipe resource for customers.”
DiGiovanni sees Solo’s brand opportunity in tapping into the company’s already large customer base. “Gozney caters to a more higher-end pizza maker, even though you get new people buying it as well,” he says. “Ooni, probably a little bit less; they’re more mass marketing, but also have a gourmet feeling there. So we said, we’re going to come up with a high-performance oven with our lifetime warranty, but we want to market it to everyone. So we always said we’re the pizza oven for everyone.”
The company took its approach to brand equity into the product line late last year, launching the Pi Fire—a pizza oven that sits atop the Solo Stove firepit, combining its powers in the most natural way possible.
THE PERSONALITY
Founded in 2010, Gozney began in the U.K. as a commercial pizza oven maker before launching its first portable outdoor oven, the Roccbox, in 2016. Tom Gozney’s namesake brand, more than its rivals, focuses the most on storytelling and content. From the start, Gozney knew he wanted his ovens not only to make great pizza but look great while doing it.
The same can be said for its brand marketing. Chief marketing officer Jonathan Kantor says that 16% of customers who buy Gozney online find the brand on YouTube. Gozney’s content work ranges from brand ambassador Brad Leone using a Roccbox on his own YouTube shows to Tom Gozney cooking with Matty Matheson, chef and producer of the award-winning show The Bear, and producing videos with legendary pizza master Chris Bianco.
“We have over 200,000 subscribers on YouTube, and we’re the second-largest brand-owned outdoor cooking channel,” says Kantor. “We’ve invested 100% in creating the content, and it’s grown organically without paid support. It was just very clear that our consumer was engaged with our content and wanted more of it.”
The brand has a few different types of content, ranging from recipes to short-form videos with personalities to more long-form video. Chef Danny Bowien hosts a YouTube show called Danny Does on the recently launched GozneyTV, in which he explores New York’s restaurants and then teaches viewers how to cook the meals on a Gozney Dome oven from his East Side balcony.
“It’s 90% Danny going into restaurants to explore ingredients and dishes, and 10% of him using our products and cooking on them,” says Kantor.
The brand’s ambassador program has a few different tiers, with guys like Matheson, Leone, and Bianco, then an equally important level called the Pizza Collective, a group of 100 pizza makers scattered around the country, who show up at pop-up restaurants or farmers markets and cook on Gozney products. The brand has also hosted higher-end events like the Secret Supper Club, a five-stop world tour of events where tickets are sold to eat a meal in a unique locale. A recent example found Leone cooking in Utah’s Wasatch Front.
Gozney says it saw a 65% increase in global sales this past summer, and now has ovens in more than 200,000 households. When it launched its higher-end Dome oven in 2021, it sold out globally in under eight hours during its priority presale, selling more than 3,800 units for over $6.5 million in revenue.
Kantor says Gozney takes a lot of inspiration from Patagonia as a founder-led brand story. Gozney himself has been very open about his own story, going from addiction to recovery, and the role making pizza played in helping get his life in order. “When you think about [Patagonia founder] Yvon Chouinard and his story, a lot of brands come to market and they need or try to manufacture a founder story to establish their why as a brand,” says Kantor. “We have Tom’s amazing story that we’ve only really started to scratch the surface of telling. Two years ago, we did a signature Roccbox for him, where we raised six figures that gave back to nonprofits that support addiction recovery and mental health.”
Leone met Gozney after the founder reached out a few years ago. Leone was already using the RoccBox, and the two hit it off. That relationship became official last year, and Leone’s signature model Roccbox dropped in September. “Gozney is doing a really great job with the product, but also working with good people, folks who will help organically build the brand together,” says Leone. “At the end of the day, customers aren’t stupid, and of course the product has to work, but it also involves the content behind the brand.”
BEYOND PIZZA
Last January, Leone ventured into the freezing temperatures of a Buffalo parking lot to cook breakfast for the Bills Mafia. Filming for his YouTube show “Local Legends,” Leone met some of the most creative cooks on the NFL tailgating scene, with names like Pinto Ron, and delicacies like pancakes made on shovels and Italian wedding soup cooked in a garden watering pail. All the while taking shots of 100-proof cherry liqueur from a bowling ball.
Hours before the Bills kickoff against the Miami Dolphins, Leone drops the tailgate on his truck and starts cooking up cast-iron ham and eggs. Not on a shovel, though. It’s a Roccbox. As he shows off the results to his cameraman, a Bills fan wanders into the shot gawking at the display. “I’m amazed,” the fan says, in a perfect, unscripted moment. “The product is amazing, just look at the food in there, amazing.”
Leone isn’t the only one using his pizza oven for far more than pizza. All the brands I spoke to see this evolution as key to the future growth of their companies and the outdoor cooking market overall. This is reflected in their content, with video recipes for the ovens, like reverse-seared cowboy steak and roasted hand-dived scallops with chorizo.
More than 75 million U.S. households own a grill, and 25 million own more than one. Ooni, Gozney, and Solo aren’t competing just against each other now, but such massive grill brands as Weber and Traeger, as well as every other outdoor cooking tool, from smokers to flat-tops, among other options.
“I actually have this argument with people all the time,” Leone tells me over Zoom in November. “Just because it’s really good at pizza doesn’t mean this is a hammer to hit one type of nail. Some of my favorite things to cook in [the Roccbox] are seafood and steaks. It’s just a really good, hot oven.”
Fire up the outdoor cooking brand battle.
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