Crust Pizza Co. is making waves in the southeast and could become your latest competition.
Founded by childhood friends Mark Raspberry and Clint Price in The Woodlands, Texas, a Houston suburb, the first Crust Pizza Co. was "busting at the seams with way too much traffic," said Carl Comeaux, CEO of the brand, when it opened in 2011.
Carl Comeaux, CEO of Crust Pizza Co. Photo: Crust Pizza Co.
The founders signed a second lease just a five-minute drive from the first location and opened several more locations quickly following the first.
Comeaux, who has experience scaling brands, was brought on board with his business partner, Nick Fontenot, to help Crust grow even more in 2016. "We understood how that whole process works," Comeaux said in a phone interview.
The first franchisee signed up in 2018.
Comeaux moved back to Louisiana about a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Crust headquarters in Texas and wanted to open a Crust there. Raspberry and Price turned Comeaux down after looking at the demographics of Lake Charles, Louisiana, but Comeaux was insistent: the demographics would support a pizzeria, so he and Fontenot began developing their own pizza concept. Nine months and a lot of money spent on research and development later, and Raspberry and Price came back and told Comeaux to open a Crust Pizza Co. in Lake Charles.
"I knew Crust was special," Comeaux said. "I knew I could take Crust and really scale it."
Raspberry, Comeaux, Fontenot and Price are equal partners now and all four are active in the company. AUV sits at $1.65 million per unit.
On the menu
The menu was saddled down with 60 menu items and five different sizes of pizza. "It was just hard to scale at the time," Comeaux said. "We took the top items for pizza, the top-selling items for pasta and salads and appetizers and we condensed that menu from 60-plus items down to 30. We took it from five pizza sizes down to two with a kids' size, and so we really thought even the price structure — we did more of a flat pricing structure rather than nickeling and diming you for every topping."
The menu consists of gourmet pizzas and a build-your-own up to 10 toppings for one price. A one-topping pizza costs less.
Dough is made fresh every day. The brand has its own proprietary whole-milk mozzarella cheese that comes in 40-pound blocks and is shredded on site daily. All the produce is fresh for salads and pizzas.
"When you taste our pizza, you can taste the freshness," Comeaux said.
Cheese bread is the brand's top seller, and it's served with house-made marinara. Aside from pepperoni pizza, the Carl's King, a supreme pizza, is a top seller, as is the Blanco, a pizza with an olive-oil base topped with garlic, spinach, mozzarella, red onions and bacon with sliced Roma tomatoes.
The blacked chicken capri and chicken Alfredo are popular pasta items.
The restaurants serve beer and wine as well.
Pizza accounts for 75% of sales and are baked in conveyor ovens for consistency. "There's no way we could keep the consistency with a deck oven," Comeaux said.
Operations
Dine-in, which makes up half of the brand's business, is an important segment for Crust Pizza Co. Comeaux said the brand is considered "limited service." It's not fast casual, but it's not full service either. Guests order at a counter, get their drinks and the food is brought to the tables. Food is served on real plates with real silverware. After they're finished, employees bus the tables.
Comeaux said they made a few tweaks to the interior, but said the interior is already incredible. The brand likes endcaps with patios and adds turf for games like cornhole. The inside has gray and white coloring with woods and open ceilings to make it inviting.
The kitchen is open to allow guests to see their food being made, an extra layer of trust not found in all restaurants today.
"It's a really cool, upscale environment that you could bring your kids to after a ballgame or you could bring your significant other on a date night," Comeaux said.
Neighborhoods are the target demographic, and Crust wants to be known as the local pizzeria, Comeaux added. On Tuesday nights, kids eat free. On Wednesdays there's half-off wine. Monday is Spirit Night in which local organizations are invited to come in and 15% of the proceeds from that night's sales goes to school groups, sports clubs or churches. One of the brand's values is giving back.
Delivery is made by third-party drivers, which Comeaux said works well for the brand. They might test their own delivery drivers in the future, and curbside is popular.
The brand has built its own franchise portal with proprietary software to help support the franchise process from sales all the way to opening a location. They're also building their own guest-facing point-of-sale system.
"We're going to own the entire tech stack in the next six months," Comeaux said. "And why is that important? It's important because having all your tech under one umbrella and being able to pivot when something needs to be tweaked or added is very powerful."
Comeaux said he did that with other concepts he scaled and it proved to be an invaluable move.
Building that tech stack has been the brand's biggest challenge, Comeaux said. A third-party POS system proved to be a bad move for the brand. They had an app sitting on a shelf for nine months that would never integrate with the third-party POS.
Growth
In all, the brand has 27 units. Two more are expected to open by December, bringing the total to 10 for the year. Next year, 15 new restaurants are on the books to be opened. The goal is to get to 25 openings per year, Comeaux said.
"We want to be the household pizza place in the southeast," Comeaux said. Right now, though, Crust is mainly growing in Texas and Louisiana, with plans to expand to Florida and the Carolinas. They want to remain a regional pizzeria to keep resources, training and support manageable.
"We want to make sure you have the same experience in College Station, Texas, at Texas A&M (University) to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, at LSU," Comeaux said. "We want to make sure at every single location, you're having the same experience. That's very important to us."
Real estate has also proven to be a challenge. Since Crust prefers endcaps, the demand for finding real estate has been difficult in some areas. Rental prices have gone through the roof, Comeaux said.
Comeaux added that 75% of leases they're signing are future development, meaning it could be up to a year before a Crust is opened in a location.
For fledgling operators entering the pizza business, Comeaux said to have a solid business plan put together by a professional with a performer to ensure a new brand makes it.
"The reason is margins — we have great margins, but if we were just a single user starting this concept without any brand awareness it would be really challenging because I would think that profit margins that we're at would be eliminated," he said. "Our food costs right now are 28%. Your food costs would be probably closer to 40%. You would have to increase your pricing by 25% to 30% to get your costs of goods in line."
