F&D Heroes Issue 1

Pizza Pilgrim’s Pizza in the Post has been a massive
success, what inspired the tasty parcels?
It was really my my brother, James’ idea to do it. We’d
been in lockdown for about two weeks and were
trying to figure out what to do.
And then my brother just called me out of the blue
and said, I’ve had this idea to send the ingredients of
a pizza through the post. Do you want to receive one?
I agreed, even though it sounded impossible. It
arrived the next day in a sort of wool bag and it
was a complete car crash, there had been a tomato
explosion everywhere. But the crucial thing was, it
was cold and under the required temperature for
food safety.
So we embarked on trying to send a few around
the country and just see how they turned out. We
thought, let’s have a crack, we’ll put a few up on our
website and see what happens.
We put 50 available to buy on the Wednesday
morning at 9:00 am and thought that would last us a
week or so. We sold out in 25 seconds or something
crazy. So the next day we advertised another 50, I
think we had 500 people try and buy one in the
first minute.
On Friday, we put 1,100 kits on sale. It was the busiest
hour in the history of the company, even with all the
restaurants closed. Since then, it’s just been frantic to
try and get on top of the service and improve it. But it
has been a really fun journey.
How did you fulfil the huge influx of orders?
It was great, just like being a start-up again. We
begged the landlord to let us have the restaurant next
door, they gave us the keys to that, so we moved all
the furniture out of the restaurant.
We bought loads of trestle tables and lined them up,
it was the opposite of a production line though, the
fridge was downstairs at the back, and the pizza dough
counter is upstairs at the front. It was also at the time
when nobody knew the social distancing situation,
so there was this endless ballet going on with people
dodging around each other and the tables.
The biggest issue we had by miles, and we had no
idea the level of anguish it was going to cause, was
ice packs. It turns out if you fill a chest freezer with
a thousand ice packs, it takes a week for them to
completely freeze.
We also didn’t realise that if the packs have the
smallest split, when it defrosts during the transit
process, all of the water comes out, and turns your
beautiful pizza box into mulch.
41