Operations

Dough Boy Pizza: a chef-driven, tech-enabled pizza powerhouse

Classically trained chef Erica Barrett went from Southern cooking to fast casual pizza when she opened Dough Boy Pizza. The brand is slated to have 10 units by the end of the year.

Photo: Dough Boy Pizza

November 14, 2024 by Mandy Wolf Detwiler — Editor, Networld Media Group

Erica Barrett is not the type of entrepreneur to build a restaurant and walk away. A classically trained chef, Barrett's focus is on Southern food, and she puts her talent to good use at her acclaimed restaurant, SOCU Southern Kitchen and Oyster Bar, which has locations in Mobile and Birmingham, Alabama.

While she was building her brand in Birmingham, the owners of the food hall in which SOCU was located had been wanting a pizza brand for their customers for five years. The building was historic, and there were tight parameters a brand would have to follow. The right fit just hadn't been found.

That is, until Barrett came along. "I told them that I would take on the challenge," she said, "And it was a challenge because in that building, we weren't able to launch a pizza concept with a vent hood. The space that was available did not have a vent hood so it kind of forced me into creating what I call now the 'smart pizza shop concept' where we don't have vent hoods or grease traps."

As she developed her concept for the food hall, she said she started to become obsessed with the culture of pizza — where it's been, where it's going — and out of that came Dough Boy Pizza Co., a tech-forward chef-driven brand that has proven to be easier than the labor-intensive food that gave her her start in the restaurant industry.

"I absolutely am having a lot of fun with it," she said, adding that it cost $15,000 for her to open her first pizza shop in Birmingham in 2022 in just 100 square feet. (You read that right — 100 square feet.)

Though Dough Boy launched in Birmingham, Barrett eventually closed up that shop and moved to Atlanta to be closer to family. By the end of 2024, there will be 10 units, and all are now franchised.

Photo: M. Gerard Photography

On the menu

Dough Boy Pizza is Neapolitan-style pizza with a thin crust and both traditional toppings, like pepperoni and sausage, and nontraditional offerings that marry pizza with Barrett's professional chef training.

Popular pizzas include the Piled Up Pepperoni Paulie, which has red sauce, shredded mozzarella and pepperoni and the Dapper Don with mozzarella, seasoned and tossed chicken and red onion, chopped garlic, bacon bits, a barbecue drizzle and finely chopped cilantro. The meat-lovers' Good Fellas, with red sauce, mozzarella, pepperoni, sausage, ham, bacon and Italian seasoning, is also popular.

As part of Barrett's smart pizza shop concept, most of the ingredients and work is outsourced. "When I created this, I was so exhausted from just being a chef and running a full-service restaurant and the preparation of that, that I wanted this to be easy," Barrett said. "I took everything that I didn't like about running restaurants and kind of reverse engineered it."

That included looking for brand partners doing great work that could be leveraged to make the pizzeria concept easier. Barrett said she found an "amazing company that does really cool dough. They're able to supply us. We haven't had any supply chain issues."

As a result, she said the dough is consistent, and it takes only 45 minutes to open a Dough Boy Pizza versus the hours of prep in traditional pizzeria before the doors even open.

The 12-inch Neapolitan crust is airy and light, and Barret said it almost resembles a light focaccia bread.

"Neapolitan is super easy, and it's one of those things where when I created the concept, why not go to the original place where pizza started, which is Naples," Barrett said. "The Neapolitan pizza is where we saw our first forms of what pizza should be, and we really pay homage to that. I think that's the chef in me that wanted to do that."

Because they don't make their own dough in house, Barrett said it's easy to make the pies. Sauces and some meats are made in house and vegetables are caramelized on site. Barrett owns a manufacturing plant as well as her restaurants, so she can source her own ingredients from there.

Pizza accounts for 90% of sales and are baked out of stone deck countertop ovens imported from Italy. Each store has three to four ovens. Capacity is about 125 pies per hour, Barrett said, and the ovens go up to 675 degrees.

Photo: Dough Boy Pizza

Operations

Continuity has been a challenge since the company has begun growing, but "it's something we're working on," Barrett said. "I'm a chef, and I'm a creative, and I just love doing things that have never been done before."

Still, the brand is putting quality assurances in place, checking in with stores to ensure they're staying compliant and leveraging a tight c-suite so there's more than one set of eyes on the pies. Internally, there are brand guides, operational manuals and recipe books in place to help.

"We try to control as much as we can in house as we grow," Barrett added. "So, as we continue to grow, we will bring more distribution and grow our manufacturing and product distribution with our franchisees versus dealing with a huge distributor. … What we noticed is, in our beginning days, that franchisees would go on the order guide, and they started ordering toppings that were not a part of what's on our menu. Now we've put controls in place to where that can't happen. We've put it at the POS level as well."

Dough Boy Pizza stands out from its competition in two ways, Barrett explained. First, the pizzas are baked and given to guests in three to four minutes versus the traditional eight to 10 minutes at other fast-casual pizza brands.

Second, Dough Boy Pizza delights in creative flavors. "We have a lot of fun with the brand (and) naming pies," Barrett said. "I think people love that. We're in a generation where everything is social media based. You want to keep up with the trends and I feel like because we are really our own pizza shop, we don't have to march to the beat of a corporate drum. We can just do really cool stuff without a lot of red tape. I think that makes us different."

Opening a Dough Boy Pizza, Barrett said, is cheap compared to other pizza brands. The brand offers some of the best build-out prices in the market, and operations are easy.

"On any given shift, it takes about one to two employees to work, so our labor costs are between about 10% and 12%, which is a very low number in the fast casual space," Barrett said.

How? There are no cashiers, for one. Customers use kiosks to order. Self-checkout has been used in retail for years but has only recently been used widely in restaurants. It helps reduce Dough Boy's labor costs.

The dough is not made in house so they're able to slash labor costs by outsourcing.

Photo: M. Gerard Photography

Banking on the future

With one location in Mobile and two in Atlanta, the brand plans to have 10 open by the end of the year. That includes two more Dough Boy Pizzas in Atlanta and one in Phoenix, two in L.A. and three in the Washington D.C., Maryland and Virginia area.

Barrett recently inked a deal with U.S. Foods to distribute its dough and other goods nationally.

She doesn't worry about growing too big too fast. "I think that was me the first six months of this year," Barrett admits, "but I've put a lot of people in our c-suite, a lot of people on the Board for Dough Boy … I'm surrounding myself with very smart people that know how to grow brands. We feel very confident at the pace we're growing at now."

About Mandy Wolf Detwiler

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Mandy Wolf Detwiler is the managing editor at Networld Media Group and the site editor for PizzaMarketplace.com and QSRweb.com. She has more than 20 years’ experience covering food, people and places.
 
An award-winning print journalist, Mandy brings more than 20 years’ experience to Networld Media Group. She has spent nearly two decades covering the pizza industry, from independent pizzerias to multi-unit chains and every size business in between. Mandy has been featured on the Food Network and has won numerous awards for her coverage of the restaurant industry. She has an insatiable appetite for learning, and can tell you where to find the best slices in the country after spending 15 years traveling and eating pizza for a living. 

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