Slow Rise: Why A Steady Pace is Pinsa Love’s First Priority

The frozen pizza set is about to welcome a new style of premium pies. Pinsa Love, which makes a specialty Roman pizza known as Pinsa, is heading to the frozen aisle of 120 Giant stores this month after quietly scaling in the Washington D.C-area over the past two years.

To support the expansion, the brand is also moving from Union Kitchen’s communal facilities to a larger production facility in Washington, D.C.’s Eckington neighborhood. Though continuing to self manufacture each Pinsa crust by hand, the new plant will add automation to the company’s production process. To achieve its signature light and airy crust, the dough requires nearly double the water volume of a typical pizza dough and a 72-hour-long fermentation process that must occur in a highly specific, temperature controlled environment.

“The bad news is it’s very difficult to automate because of the [crust-making] process,” said Jordan Fainberg, Pinsa Love’s founder and CEO. “The good news is that means it’s probably gonna be hard for people to come in and copy us or compete against us in a big way.”

Available in six SKUs, including Classic, Carnone Five Cheese, Pesto Mushroom, Foresta, Artisan Pepperoni and Plant-based Rustica, a single Pinsa Love product serves approximately two people and sells for between $10.99 to $14.99, depending on the retailer.

Pinsa Love has reached approximately 300 stores since expanding into retail in 2022; previously products had been sold exclusively direct-to-consumer. The company signed on with Rainforest Distributors last year and launched four SKUs at select MOM’s Organic Market stores by August 2022. That retail milestone allowed Fainberg to begin evolving the brand, including upgrading from its previous package that “looked like it was coming out of our garage,” to its current look and continuing the expansion with local independent and regional grocers.

As Pinsa Love continues to scale, Fainberg said he wants to take a slow approach to retail growth so that he can ensure the product’s premium quality isn’t lost. During the Summer Fancy Food Show this year he said the brand garnered interest from a couple large retailers, however, he asked they come back next year when he believes he will be better able to meet order commitments.

“[The retail expansion] is scary to me – we went from 140 stores to almost 300 this week and I honestly don’t know what that means,” said Fainberg. “I know that it’s a bit of a different experience, which is all I’ll say about dealing with UNFI, then [dealing with] Rainforest or self-distributing. It’s a challenge and I just want to make sure we can support it.”

A slow rise is the hallmark of a good Pinsa crust, said Fainberg, and an inclination for a supine pace may be central to the business as well.

Fainberg first discovered Pinsa on a trip to Rome in 2019. Though he planned the trip to learn new pizza making techniques, he wasn’t intending to return with a concept for a new company. Although Pinsa went to the back of his mind upon his return, when pandemic-induced boredom set in for the former foodservice executive, he began playing with the idea of bringing the pizza format to the U.S.. After teaming up with the Union Kitchen team, Fainberg finally was convinced he could create a new CPG brand.

It wasn’t the pizza making process that had Fainberg dragging his feet – it was the unfamiliar world of CPG.

He started slinging pies during his first job at Jerry’s Subs and Pizza at age 14 and continued to work at Jerry’s through college and moved up through the ranks eventually lead “non-traditional development” opportunities in the role of President of International. When he started as a teenager, the pizza and sub shop was just barely a chain restaurant – with two locations in the Maryland-area. Via a joint venture with Texaco, Fainberg helped open new franchise locations in the retailer’s stores across Central and South America. At its peak, Jerry’s operated a dozen franchises in Haitian Texaco stores, and later added locations in Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Brazil, among other countries.

“That’s the extent of my food career, but pizza was a big part of it,” he said, while explaining how that experience helped tee him up to bring Pinsa to CPG. “Look, if you could open a food concept in Haiti in the 90s – you had to be pretty creative with logistics and learning on your feet.”

He worked for Jerry’s for a total of 25 years, up until Texaco merged with Chevron in 2001 and the company was bought out. Fainberg then worked in real estate before drawing on his former food service expertise to start Pinsa Love. Originally, Pinsa Love was going to be a ghost kitchen concept and sold crusts to food service operators. However, product quality and demand lagged and the foodservice channel was put on the back burner. Fainberg said with the new Eckington production facility, he may begin retesting that strategy.

“It’s much more of a dynamic area for retail [businesses], so that enables me to really test out new flavors and get rapid response from customers,” said Fainberg. “Right now it’s very strange to me that I can’t talk to my customers, that I can’t even see who they are and I barely know how much these stores are selling. It seems so removed to me from the world of franchising and serving customers.”

Soon, the brand will participate in the Beyond SKU accelerator program which Fainberg hopes to use to continue building his network in the industry, narrow in on a growth strategy the business can support and get help navigating distributor relationships. The company is also in the process of raising about $300,000 in growth capital, with Fainberg noting the business has been “breaking even since the beginning.”

Beyond that, he hopes to begin engaging with his consumer base more to begin building the brand with a loyal following behind it, including working through social media strategies and spending.

“The person I care about more than anybody else is the person buying the product,” said Fainberg. “In this industry, I think people lose track of that. They’re concerned about their distributor, the distributor is concerned about the retailer, the retailer is concerned about their margins, but the customer is the most important and who is looking after them.”