Portland Pie Co. nears expansion to Mass.
Matt Dodge
From left, Portland Pie Co. COO Joe O'Neil and owners Steve Freese and Nat Getchell sit at the pizza purveyor's York Street location in Portland.
Fifteen years ago, the founders of Portland Pie Co. were developing their signature pizza dough at a modest takeout and delivery location in downtown Portland.
Now, thanks to three locations in Maine, two in New Hampshire, an impending move into Massachusetts and a growing retail business, Steve Freese and Nat Getchell have gone from kneading the dough to rolling in it.
While company officials said they're not ready to disclose the location of the newest Portland Pie location, Portland Pie's COO Joe O'Neil says the company plans on "trying to draw on some of that familiarity we've established in southern New Hampshire," and is honing in on a location north of Boston.
O'Neil told Reading-North Reading Patch late last year that the company was eyeing an expansion in Reading and town officials said they expected a Portland Pie Co. restaurant to open there in February.
In 2012, the company continued expanding into New Hampshire with a Nashua restaurant that O'Neil says has complemented the company's Manchester location and that gave Portland Pie three streams of revenue — dine-in, takeout and delivery — to build the business.
"The healthy distribution of our business across the three revenue centers has allowed us to grow and make a very compelling introduction of our brand to a new customer base," O'Neil says. "We're counting on that to provide us with the same advantages in the new restaurant that we will be opening in Massachusetts."
The expansion south is the latest move for the company that's grown from five employees in 1997 to around 275, building out restaurant locations in Maine and New Hampshire as it continues to grow the wholesale pizza dough business — It'll Be Pizza — that launched in 2000. With each restaurant expansion, O'Neil says, the company has added between 40 to 50 employees, which could bring the business to a total of around 325 employees this year.
On the wholesale side, It'll Be Pizza dough is now distributed by Sysco Foodservice, U.S. Foodservice, PFG Northcenter, AGAR Supply, Pine State Trading, Native Maine Produce, and Macauley Food Service to retail pizza shops, schools and restaurants in New England and other markets. The dough is also available under the Portland Pie Co. trademark at Hannaford , Shaw's and Big Y Supermarkets.
And that side of the business continues to find new markets, O'Neil says, as other food service businesses have started to use the dough for sandwich bread and rolls as well.
"It's really versatile, and that has really fed into the success of It'll Be Pizza," says O'Neil. "It creates a unique opportunity for the business to use our dough as a marketing tool."
That's part of what O'Neil says drove success in previous expansions, where the company was able to offer in-house dining, delivery and take-out and wholesale dough from the very start, "introducing the product to the same customer at three different levels of service," O'Neil says. "That was a really important aspect of our initial success in Manchester."
The COO says the company is hoping that the same brand recognition that helped the company to succeed in the New Hampshire market will extend to its next expansion into Massachusetts.
Most Recent
Most Recent
Comments