How do you bring frozen pizza to a ready-made business? Like that! 🍕🍕🍕
Ordering pizza for delivery is about as old as rotary phones (kids, ask your parents what that is) and has gotten even easier in recent years thanks to online and app ordering. So it’s hard to imagine how the delivery of pizza to your home can be improved – it’s already a pretty perfect system.
This is where General Assembly Pizza hopes to step in. The Toronto-based frozen pizza company has created an easy way to get a box of artisan pizzas to your doorstep in mixed batches, but without hogging up valuable estate freezers. And since this is Vancouver, we know it always comes down to real estate.
With apartment dwellers in mind, GA Pizza created its packaging so that frozen pies are stored in super-slim pouches, so your stack of six, eight, or 10 pizzas can slide right into your home freezer, waiting for the transition. to a hot oven before making the final trip to your belly.
GA Pizza’s founder and CEO, Ali Khan Lalani, also lived in Vancouver for a while and noticed that we love good food. “Vancouver residents are discerning foodies who demand quality and convenience. That’s why the city was a no-brainer for our first outpost outside of Ontario,” Lalani said.
However, Lalani didn’t start out in the frozen pizza game. In fact, he turned GA’s “pandemic hub” into a multi-million dollar business venture. General Assembly opened in downtown Toronto in 2017 as a chef-led pizzeria. In the spring of 2020, when expansion plans with more physical locations were halted due to the pandemic, Lalani regrouped and created the GA Pizza at home line, which opened for orders in September of the same year. Now they have grown and attracted investors and GA Pizza has been in expansion mode ever since.
GA Pizza calls its product an “elevated frozen pizza experience”, thanks not only to its compact storage size, but also to the pizza itself: available in eight options – including one entirely plant-based – GA pizzas are delivered on a natural yeast dough and are pre-baked. Once out of their packaging, the pizza only needs a few minutes in a hot oven and you’re done.
I tried an eight pack of GA pizzas and nervously unwrapped the pizzas knowing they were about to face a small, already fully loaded Tetris-style freezer, and it turned out to be a child’s play to hide them – a huge relief. It was also – unsurprisingly – easy to make and eat the pizza. Hello, it’s frozen pizza!
The menu is overseen by Executive Chef Curt Martin and currently offers a range of seven options, including a Margherita (named after Lalani’s daughter, Mila) and a plant-based “Green Margherita”, as well as simple pies like a nitrate-free pepperoni. , a four cheese or a mushroom. For spicier choices, there’s the Domonio Effect which includes red onion, mushrooms and jalapeño, or the Sweet Heat with chili, tangy salami and honey. Each pizza measures 10 inches and cuts into six or eight small slices, perfect for sharing (perhaps making a small side salad, for balance) or for a solo (non-judgmental) pizza adventure.
GA Pizza is widely available in Metro Vancouver, with a delivery area that includes Abbotsford, Burnaby, Coquitlam, Delta, Langley, Maple Ridge, New Westminster, North Vancouver, Richmond, Surrey, Vancouver and West Vancouver.
Customers can choose to build their own “stacks” or opt for a “chef’s choice” set that lets you focus on meatless or meatless options. Right now the price of six pizzas is just under $70, while eight will set you back just over $90, so basically $10 and change each, which is on par with the options of high-end frozen pizzas at the grocery store. Subscribers who set up regular pizza deliveries will enjoy some savings. The bonus here too is that they come right to your door, and you won’t have to empty your freezer to load your pizzas.
