Lessons Learned From The Best Pizza Shop In the World

What’s up, all you beautiful people? Welcome back to the podcast. I want to tell you a story about one of my absolute favorite businesses that you probably have never heard of. It’s a local joint here in the Twin Cities called Punch Pizza. This is, in my estimation, unequivocally the best pizza in all of the United States. And I say that as a guy who has eaten a whole lot of pizza in his time. I am part italian, so. So, you know, it runs into blood, this desire for pizza. You can never have too much.

But I was also a dirtbag rock climber throughout all my twenties. And in my experience, the highest calorie to dollar ratio that can be found anywhere is in the little Caesars pizza. So I lived off that for almost five straight years. Now, I know you’re thinking like, okay, little Caesar’s not great pizza. What’s that have to do with punch pizza? Now, I am not a connoisseur of, like, high quality foods generally, I am more of a quantity over quality type of guy. I’m not what you would describe as a foodie, but a number of years ago, when I moved back to Minnesota, this would have been back in 2016, maybe 2017. I’m really bad with dates, by the way. You might have noticed that as I, like, give years of things, and I’m like, there’s always a range because I don’t.

I am very. I’m temporally. Temporally blind. My girlfriend, Jamie, she refers to me as a time wizard, which means I just. I have a blind spot for time, and I feel like I can just conjure it out of nowhere. That’s why I’m late for everything, always. Anywho, so I was introduced to punch pizza a number of years ago. It is this napolitino type pizzeria with wood stove, traditional style pizzas, and they are magnificent.

Magnificent. And at the time, when I moved back to Minnesota, I started helping my friends with the academy, which was a climbing gym that was designed for competition level youth athletes that wanted to go on to compete at nationals and the Olympics and things like that. We actually coached one of the very first olympians that the US ever had in rock climbing. And just down the road was a punch pizza. So every day we would work and I’d go there for lunch, and we come back and work some more and go back for more punch pizza for dinner. I was eating there, like, literally twice a day for about two years straight. I loved it so much. And during that period of time, we had an opportunity to get to know the owners of this establishment, the two johns.

And what was really interesting is that one of the johns he had formerly, I think he founded or was like one of the founders of Caribou Coffee, which is another local chain, it’s, if you look at the most popular coffee shops in every state, it’s like Starbucks. Starbucks, Starbucks. Dunkin donuts. Dunkin donuts. Dunkin donuts. And then in Minnesota, like it’s caribou or just this outlier. And we only have caribou up here. So he got out of the coffee game and decided he had this passion for pizza.

He wanted to go and get to the, the pizza game, and him and his buddy, they dove in and they set off to make the absolute best pizza chain that you’ve ever had in your life. What makes them so unique is there’s a lot of things I’m going to go through, a couple of things that I’ve learned about their operations over the year that I think make them such a truly standout operation. What we can learn as entrepreneurs and how we can apply this to our own lives and our own businesses. But they took it very seriously. They traveled to Italy, and they put all their chefs and, and the people who are running the wood stove ovens and whatnot, the managers, through the same program, training them on this very traditional style of pizza creation. They have an insane tolerance for quality. Like they’re. That is, if I was to say, what separates them from everybody else in the game, it’s their, their obsession with quality and consistency.

So I want to share a couple of things here. Number one, they introduced this thing called the pizza cam. The pizza cam is very interesting. If you’re standing in line, you’re ordering your pizza, you probably wouldn’t even notice it. But what it is is the camera in the ceiling and every pizza that comes out of the stove, because there’s a huge amount of variability with a stove oven, right, like the wood stove oven, there’s heat coming in from all different places. If you’re not turning the pizza at the right time, the cheese is boiling and the crust is burning. And so there can be a lot of variability. How do you control for this? Well, one of the things that they do to, to assure quality is they put every single pizza as it comes off the line in front of this camera.

It takes a snapshot, and then they have, you know, a computer algorithm that runs through and says, hey, is that a good pizza or is it not a good pizza if it’s not a good pizza, if there’s any. If there’s too much bubbling, too much burning, they throw it right out and they make it again. At the end of each day, the owners, they go through every one of the stores pizza can and they just scroll through to see what was thrown out and what was kept. And they’re doing this high level double check quality assurance to see that no pizzas that don’t live up to the standard make it through. It’s a remarkable, very simple process. It doesn’t scale well because you have to have people actually manually going through and caring about the results. Right. But what I have experienced is that I have never had a bad pizza.
At Punch pizza, it’s always every single time, you know exactly what you’re getting. It’s incredibly consistent. Pizza cam is one of those reasons. The other thing that they’re ridiculous for, and I don’t know if this is entirely true, it was told to me by a very close source within the company. So it. I believe it’s true. It’s that one of the things that makes our pizzas so amazing is the quality of the dough. It’s the.
The recipe that they use for this, and they are. This dough is so good that they have taken extreme lengths to make sure that their secrets don’t get figured out, don’t get discovered by the competition. And so the. The urban legend is that every morning, the. The dough for each one of the different establishments. And I think they have, like, eight or nine different restaurants in the twin Cities here. All the dough is made at this off site bakery. Nobody knows where it is.
It’s very top secret. They count out how many dough balls are going to each location, and then it’s transported via a security truck to those locations and dropped off every morning. And at the end of each night, they take the tally of how many pizzas were created versus how much dough was thrown out and how much is left over. They account for every dough ball to make sure it didn’t go missing. It’s very interesting. I don’t know, again, how much of that is true or not, but given just the deliciousness of their dough, I wouldn’t be surprised. So, in fairness, I don’t actually know how much of that story is strictly true, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a whole lot of it is, because their dough is absolutely amazing. But this gets into something else, which I.
Total tangent. Recently, this guy, he reached out to me and he’s like, hey, at what point should I patent this product? Or how much do you worry about trademark infringement? And copyright and all that stuff. My overarching response to that has always been that if you’re concerned about trademarks and patents and copyright infringements before you’ve even made the thing or before you’ve even tried to sell the thing, then you’re probably not cut out for entrepreneurship. You’re looking for too much safety and security and guarantees in this business, and there certainly are not any. And the truth is, trademarks and patents and all that stuff, it’s a whole lot of time, it’s a whole lot of wasted energy that could just be spent going out and getting customers and delivering your products. As you scale and you get to a certain size, sure, maybe those things start to play a more important role, but you probably don’t have such a revolutionary product at the moment that dictates you need to go and start with a patent or anything like that. Anyhoo, tied into the pizza side of things, I don’t think they have any kind of patent on their dough. They’re just very careful about protecting it because it’s very, very popular.
So that is an instance where I would, if I was them, try to protect the recipe, which they’re doing. But if you’re just starting off, don’t worry about that yet. You don’t have anything to protect anyway. Okay, let’s talk about some other things that they do at this pizza shop, which are absolutely phenomenal. So again, these guys, the johns, the owners, they are nerds for pizza, which is, and they’re so committed to the quality and consistency of the product that they’re putting out, which is why they’ve never expanded outside of the twin Cities, outside of Minnesota. They’re never going to open up in the midwest or out in the coast, because they’re committed to controlling the quality of the product. And they’re not concerned with being the biggest and the best in the world. They just want to be the best here and the best that they can be.
And so they’ve turned down franchising opportunities. And trust me, there’s a lot of opportunities out there. They could easily franchise this and scale to the moon, and it would absolutely take over the country. But they’ve chosen deliberately. That’s not the type of company that they want to build, which is, I think, really, really cool. But again, they’re pizza nerds. They’re doing this because they love it and they’re committed to making the absolute best product that they can. And there’s two things that they’ve done, very interestingly, that two inventions to two ideas that they took from inception into creation.
First is when you get your plate. Now, I’ve been eating there for a number of years, so I remember before, they hadn’t created this, this new invention yet, but what it was, when your pizza comes out to you now, it’s on this porcelain plate that has these bubbles in it. It’s not just a flat plant, flat pan like you would see most pizzas. Come on, it’s just. It’s all these bubbles. And I asked them about it, and the response was, well, the bubbles raise up the dough so that the heat, as it’s sitting on the pan, has more airflow to be able to disperse instead of getting these hot pockets. And I was like, oh, that’s really interesting that you guys cared enough to go and make this completely unique invention to optimize your pizzas that nobody else is really going to care about or notice. Because their pizzas were so good before, this only made it marginally better.
And yet they’re so committed to the process that even a 1% improvement in their book is sufficient, despite the fact that their customers will likely never be able to tell that the pizza is that 1% better than it otherwise was. Now, 2020 came and went, but that was a very tough time for restaurants. Right? You remember, everybody was shut down. Nobody could eat in restaurants. And it was a very, very traumatic experience for a lot of restaurants. Well, punch was no different. But pizza is one of those food vessels that can travel very easily. Right? Most people are used to getting pizzas delivered to their home, so that’s an experience that they’re used to.

But the punch pizza, because of the function of how it’s created in the wood stove oven or the brick oven or whatever, it doesn’t travel very well. It’s best when it’s consumed just a couple of minutes after it comes out of the oven. And again, these guys are so committed to the quality and consistency of their product, they’re like, that won’t do. We don’t want to just send people this pizza. That’s great right now, but by the time they get home in 510, 1520 minutes from now, it’s cold, it’s sloppy, it’s no good. So they wanted to create a way for people to reheat their pizzas at home and be able to still get that same experience that they got if they were eating in the restaurant. But they didn’t want to just have people microwave it or throw it in the stove or anything like that. And so what they did is they created this cast iron pan that’s specifically designed, again, with the ridges and the bumps, and everything is designed for the pizzas, for the reheating.

And it came with instructions. And they said, take this pan, put it on in the oven at this temperature for this period of time, and it will recreate as closely as we can from your home, the experience that you would get in the restaurant. And they created this alternative revenue line through these completely unique. I’ve never seen them before, cast iron pans. I think they’re cast iron panels or some kind of. I don’t know what they are. Don’t quote me on that. But they’re very interesting.

But it was a very amazing pivot to be able to just say for them to not accept the. The reality of their situation and say, you know, it is what it is. They could have just rested on their laurels and said, people will understand. We will give them the pizza. They’ll understand it’s not as good by the time you get home. And we all understand that. Like, that’s just the nature of delivery and, you know, taking food to go, right. But they weren’t.

They did not accept that. They said, no, we can do better. We can. We can help improve this process. And it’s that. That commitment to continual optimization, continual improvement that makes them so damn good from beginning to end. And it’s why I truly believe that they are the best pizza in the country. So if you ever find yourself up here in the Twin Cities, make sure you go check out punch pizza.

I have no affiliation with them, not getting any kickbacks or anything like that. I’m just a pizza aficionado. I love them. I love what they stand for. I love how they built their business, and there’s so many cool lessons and huge here from how they run their business that we can take and apply within our own context, our own lives, our own businesses. And I hope that you’re able to take one of these. The pizza can, the dough security, that reheating pan, that air cooling pan, all those ideas, and I hope you’re able to take them and implement them into your own life. So that’s gonna do it for me, guys and gals.

Let me know. Have you ever eaten at punch pizza? Have you ever been up here? Have you ever experienced the deliciousness that is this cuisine? Or do you disagree? Do you have a better piece of place in mind? Let me know what that is as well, and I’ll check it out when I’m on your side of the town. That’ll do it for me. Guys and gals, we’ll catch you in the next episode. Until then, stay hyper focused, my friends. Bye.