The Untold Truth Of Blaze Pizza

Blaze Pizza is on fire these days — pun intended — opening up new fast-casual pizza restaurant locations left and right.

With its completely customizable pizzas, a strong commitment to the environment, artisinal ingredient options, funky restaurant designs, and myriad menu options for people with dietary restrictions, it's no surprise that Blaze Pizza is becoming so popular. The chain specializes in oven-fired pizzas with dozens of toppings to choose from, including some non-traditional options like gorgonzola cheese and vegan chorizo.

The chain first opened in 2011 as the brainchild of entrepreneurs Rick and Elise Wetzel. Name sound familiar? It should, as this business-minded duo is also behind the popular mall food court staple, Wetzel's Pretzels. Clearly, the Wetzels and their other partners have a track record for success. Case in point: Blaze Pizza is now one of the fastest-growing restaurant chains in America, easily topping its competitors like MOD Pizza and Pieology.

If you're wondering what type of secret sauce is helping to make Blaze Pizza so successful, read on to learn about the untold truth of this new pizza giant.

Lots of companies partner with celebrities to endorse their products — these sponsorships usually relate to the celebrity's profession, like playing professional sports or looking beautiful while walking down a runway. In these instances, the company pays the celebrity to endorse the product or service.

But in other cases, celebrities are so intrigued by an idea that they actually decide to invest their own money to help see it succeed. After all, they usually have tons of money to spend and are often looking for ways to invest it. Such is the case with LeBron James, an early investor in Blaze Pizza. He even gave up a deal with McDonald's in order to back the burgeoning pizza chain, but it seems his risk has paid off. According to SBNation, James' initial $1 million investment in 2012 has grown to $35 million and counting. 

And how does James like his pizza, you might be wondering? When he's hungry, he'll add as many as 16 toppings to his pie! Having James on board has undoubtedly helped the fast-growing restaurant chain become so successful, too. After all, James has some serious star power, with more than 68 million follows on Instagram alone,  and he posts about Blaze Pizza quite often.

If you've ever eaten different styles of pizza (New York, deep dish, hand-tossed, etc.), then you already know that not all crusts are created equal — far from it, in fact. The crusts made by Blaze Pizza are also unique, in that they're fermented for at least 24 hours.

Blaze Pizza's dough is made with filtered water, unbleached flour, yeast, extra virgin olive oil, and just a sprinkle of salt. This simple dough is then allowed to hang out for 24 hours to let the yeast do its thing (eating the sugars in the dough's ingredients, then releasing carbon dioxide gas), which ultimately leads to air pockets in the dough. The result is a crispy, light crust that serves as the perfect base for all of Blaze Pizza's many toppings. Blaze Pizza's crusts are made fresh, not created in some warehouse somewhere and then frozen for weeks at a time.

Blaze Pizza also makes gluten-free dough, keto crusts, and cauliflower gluten-free dough, so even if you've got certain crust-related dietary restrictions, like a gluten allergy or intolerance, you can still enjoy their pies.

If you've ever made pizza at home, then you know that when you're starving, it can feel like it takes forever before all the cheese has finally melted and the crust gets crispy. Not at Blaze Pizza. In fact, the pizza cooks at Blaze Pizza restaurants only bake each pizza for a maximum of 180 seconds — three minutes, to be exact — because the oven is so incredibly hot.

Blaze Pizza's ovens can reach temperatures of up to 900 degrees Fahrenheit, which essentially flash cooks each pizza in record time. Because of this and many other restaurant efficiencies, each location can churn out more than 200 pizzas an hour.

As you might imagine, it's not easy to figure out how to cook a pizza perfectly, without burning any part of it, in an oven that's so hot. The team at Blaze understands the oven inside and out, including where any hot spots might be located — they know if and when they need to move the pizzas around to get the perfect level of doneness. The specially trained crew of people who bake the pizzas are called pizzasmiths or pizzaiolos, an Italian word that literally translates to "someone who makes pizzas in a pizzeria." How very appropriate.

Blaze Pizza is truly a modern restaurant chain, through and through. They understand the values of their customers — mostly young people, including Millennials and Gen Z-ers — and they're putting their money where their mouth is. Case in point: All Blaze Pizza locations use 100 percent eco-friendly packaging. This means that every single food storage container, soda cup, and utensil is recyclable, compostable, or made from post-consumer reclaimed materials. In 2019, the popular pizza chain also started getting rid of plastic straws, replacing them with new domed lids instead; they also put up signs to communicate their disdain for straws, taking the initiative one step further and encouraging diners to simply give up using straws in their lives altogether.

For Blaze Pizza lovers who want to do their part in protecting the environment, this is good news, since you can eat as many pizzas as your heart desires without worrying about all the garbage you're sending to the landfill. 

"Forks, knives, cups, lids — even those cute little containers that hold the salad dressing — were thoughtfully chosen because they left a smaller footprint than most commonly available choices," according to the Blaze Pizza website.

There's no way around it: People just love Disney. Even grown adults flock to the Disney theme parks on a regular basis to meet characters, ride the rides, and just generally enjoy the whimsical atmosphere and the warm weather. Perhaps that's why the Disney Springs location of Blaze Pizza is so wildly successful. Thousands of people a day visit this restaurant located in Disney Springs, which is basically like a large, outdoor Disney-themed shopping mall near Orlando, Florida (not far from Disney World!).

In fact, this location is so busy that it can produce up to 3,000 pizzas per day. Blaze even argues that it's likely the busiest pizza joint on the planet (of course, that's debatable). The company calls this their "flagship location" and you can see from pictures just how massive it really is. This specific location was designed with high-volume pizza-making in mind, ensuring that hungry diners can get in and out in a jiffy without getting too hangry along the way.

There are more than 300 Blaze Pizza locations in various states around the country — the chain has rapidly expanded its national reach in recent years.

Now, they're also taking their build-your-own-pizza franchise overseas, with new locations in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain. All told, there are four international locations so far, and Blaze Pizza promises that even more are in the works. You can expect to see Blaze Pizza locations opening in the near future in Mexico, Asia, and Europe, according to an interview a Blaze Pizza executive gave to Skift.

From a very big-picture perspective, the company hopes to expand to a total of 1,000 locations around the world by 2022, an ambitious goal that also aligns with the company's plan to go public in the same year. The chain operates with a franchise model, with each new location taking about 20 weeks to design, build, and open.

The people who work at Blaze Pizza locations around the country genuinely seem to enjoy their jobs. It's a fast-paced environment, so every shift flies by in the blink of an eye. Plus, the company encourages its employees to be themselves when they come to work — they want their employee's authentic personalities to shine through, so long as they are offering top-notch customer service and making delicious pizzas at the same time. The company often promotes from within, with employees rising through the ranks to the positions of shift leader, then manager, then corporate.

And for employees who want to be their own boss, they can easily apply to open up their own franchise location, too. Blaze Pizza's franchise fee is between $20,000 and $30,000 per store, with a continuous payment of seven percent of sales to go to advertising and royalties, according to the company's website. You'll need to have saved up some additional cash beyond that, however, as Blaze requires all partners to have at least $500,000 in cash reserves. And you'll be responsible for covering the costs of operating the restaurant, which typically range from $319,800 to $858,000 per year. 

As a franchise owner, you'll spend two weeks training at their headquarters in Pasadena, California, then two weeks training at your store.