Ooni’s founder on pizza ovens, mixers, and his favorite toppings

I was getting frustrated by the standard of planetary mixers in the market. I’ve gone through maybe four of them over the previous sort of 10 years. I was like, why is my dough so inconsistent? This can’t be what bakeries and pizzerias and these kind of places are willing to accept.

I did a lot of research speaking with restaurants around the world and it just kept coming back to a spiral mixer. And then so well, all of these spiral mixers are like $2,000.

There’s an interesting link between the inception of the Ooni in the beginning and then with the spiral mixer. There wasn’t good alternatives for the home user. And even those ones that you might be like, if you spend like $1,000 on it, they look really industrial and sort of like tractors from the ’60s.

And so there was a really great opportunity here for us to create something that we know our customers would absolutely love because we want one of these, and we could potentially bring in a lot more other people into the fold.

Now we have these two perfect ways for customers to come into the world: You can either buy a pizza oven or you can buy a mixer. And when you buy one of them, you’ll fall in love with it and then you buy the other one. That’s at least what we’re hoping for.

It’ll be interesting to see where it is at the end of this year. We’re super proud of the product. It’s properly challenging the market which hasn’t really had that much innovation for a really long time. There’s some players who’ve kind of got settled into their quite a comfortable position at the leaders of the market, but they haven’t had to do anything interesting.

It will be really interesting to see how much of our business actually becomes mixers in the future. I think it could be a fair bit. This is not just a pizza dough mixer. If you make bread at home, like this is the best mixer for making bread at home. And I say that without any hyperbole.

You can make cookies and cakes and all these types of things, but our customers, especially if they love this sourdough, they love their bread baking at home, this opens up a whole new level of possibilities.