Over the past few years, the market for home pizza ovens has risen like a well-proofed ball of dough. Perhaps no company has popularized the market better than Ooni, which launched its first oven more than a dozen years ago, by Kristian Tapaninaho, a Finn, in of all places, Scotland.
Recently, Ooni released its first appliance that wasn't a pizza oven — the Ooni Halo Pro, a spiral mixer.
I sat down with Tapaninaho to chat with him about where Ooni has been, where it's going, and, of course, what he likes on his pizza.
The following quotes have been edited for clarity.
What inspired you to come up with the Ooni pizza oven?
I got into pizza making at home in 2010 before pizza at home became a thing, and I was constantly trying to get better at it, but really quickly, realized that one of the key things with making great pizza is about the temperature of the oven.
It's of course, about the ingredients and all that stuff that all matters, but really, you can't fake it, you can't fake 900 degrees in a domestic oven. So I started looking at what's in the market.
The only things at the time were the large traditional brick built ovens. Now, we have barbecues ranging from thousands of dollars to hundreds of dollars. Why don't we have the same thing for pizza? And at that point I realized I might have spotted a bit of a gap in the market.
What was the key to unlocking its performance?
I set myself boundaries on which to operate with the product. I wanted to be able to ship it easily to customers. I wanted to be able to get up to those 800/900-degree temperatures so you can get genuine Neapolitan-style pizza made with it. And I want it to be wood fired.
One of these sort of unlocks was that we discovered pellets, which were fairly new in the U.K. Discovering those as a sort of energy source, that was the unlock of, okay, I think I can do something with this, and build from that.
You wouldn’t expect a pizza oven to come out of the UK
I was actually chatting with one of our Italian distributors, and I was saying that I don't think this could have been invented in Italy. I think there's something about when people leave their familiar surroundings and you have that mix of cultures.
I think there's a lot that happens when you mix cultures together and that sort of spark that emerges from that. If you just live in your own familiar surroundings all the time, you don't really really question it in the same way.
So I think it's really important, but we're hopeful for our kids that they don't stay in Edinburgh for for university and stuff when the time comes. That they actually do go and experience outside the world, because I think it's really super important.
And that's why in the U.S., some of the largest companies were founded by people who themselves or whose parents came in from a different culture. It's about that mix of cultures, that creates a lot of spark that gets things going.
What was the thinking behind the Ooni Koda 2 Max?
It's 24 inches wide, but it's 21 inches deep, so you can get a 20 or 21 inch pie in there.
There's so much fun to make because then you are actually making a proper New York-style big pizza. It's such a different experience to like a Neapolitan style that we've been so used to.
While you can technically make a small New York style [pizza in our other ovens] it is really so much about the large scale of it.
Every couple of years there's usually a new model that comes out. Now you've gone full size, and then you've made improvements to sort of previous models, what are the challenges going forward? Is there a certain point where the iteration ends?
So I think I think we're still maybe 10 years out from that point of when things start becoming a lot more sort of incremental. I think we've got about maybe 10 years worth of sort of fairly big, or maybe, I don't know, five to 10 years worth of really good sort of big step changes.
Our focus is really on providing the best experience for our customers as possible, and part of that is like now with Koda 2 Max and actually all of the Koda 2 range, you barely have to turn the pizza anymore.
We've got about a 30 degree, 40-degree Fahrenheit delta between the hottest and the coldest point. Now that's massive for customers [so you] don't have to worry about the pizza in there, you can focus on what's happening around you like chatting with your family or your friends. So there's those types of things that we're constantly working on.
Nw you've expanded into a whole new category. How did you decide on a mixer?
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.
Do you have a favorite topping?
I'm a big advocate of and fan of anchovies. So my favorite Neapolitan style is just like your Napolitana, which is anchovies, capers, sliced garlic, and calamata olives, crossed on top, no cheese, just quite a lot of sauce and that's just baked really quickly with a bit of basil as well. And it’s really quite salty, but you can't go wrong with that.
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