Pizza Today - July 2023 - 45

Thiago Vasconcelos
Age: 38
Owner
Pedroso's Pizza
Austin, Texas
Instagram handle: @pedrosospizza
@pizzaiologist
What are the keys to your success
as a permanently parked pizza
trailer?
Austin Texas is a really friendly food
truck/trailer city, here it's not required to
move your trailer/truck at the end of the
day making your mobile business kind of a
small brick and mortar. This allowed us to
have regular customers that know exactly
where we are and can locate us when they
want. With that in mind, location was
everything for us. We are parked next to
a bar called 'The Night Owl' and it works
like a partnership for us. We get some of
their customers and they get some of ours,
but most of our clientele come from the
neighborhood. Once a few locals tried our
pizza, news spread like wildfire and local
Austianiets absolutely love to support
local/small business. We're in a residential
area that is growing like crazy and having
our commissary kitchen located only
eight minutes away from us is a big plus
as well. We produce everything from the
commissary and transfer it in our van every
morning before opening, it is quite the
hassle moving a kitchen in and out of a
trailer almost daily.
As a veteran pizza maker turned
pizza business owner, what made
the transition work for you?
A few different things happened at the
right time. The idea was never to open
a pizza trailer, we had some people that
were going to back us financially and we
were looking for a brick n' mortar. Then
one month before we were set to pull the
trigger the pandemic started, no one had
funds to invest anymore, everyone was
saving money. I was frustrated by this but
now I had to start my own thing from
zero, I came across a company that made
these really small trailers and knowing how
friendly Austin, Texas, is to this business
model I decided to dive in. My wife Alissa
Gibson and I got what
little money we had
and bought this tiny
7'x12' trailer, along
with the cheapest
equipment we could
find and launched
'Pedroso's Pizza The
Trailer' in the middle
of the pandemic.
Everyone thought we
were crazy, but at the
time the idea of just
coming to a window
and getting your food
with very little contact
made a lot of sense
for us. Experience was
a main factor as well,
knowing the product,
how to get it done and
how to get it done with
cheap equipment was
a test to everything I
had learned in all my
years of making pizza.
This is also a totally
ominous environment
we're working in, you never imagine
yourself making pizza in monsoon rains
and then two days later dealing with triple
digit heat. The temperatures in Austin can
go from 25 F to 105 F throughout the
year, making it really difficult to work with
something so delicate like pizza dough and
our trailer at that time was two aluminium
sheets of metal protecting us from all the
elements. This was all very challenging for
us but we were determined to succeed.
You upgraded your pizza trailer.
What made you decide to invest in
a new trailer and how has the new
trailer allowed you to grow?
In that first trailer we managed to have
everything we needed inside including
a 30 qt mixer and storage for our small
operation. My wife and I did everything
out of that trailer for over a year, and we
kind of really just let things happen, no
marketing, very little social media, we
knew we couldn't handle too much volume
at that time. We were fortunate enough
to allow our business to grow organically
and the immense support from our
customers really propelled the progress of
the business. At the time we had no idea
if it was all going to work out or not, if
we needed a bigger trailer or tried to find
people to invest in the business and open a
brick and mortar. We just got to the point
that we were too busy for our size, with a
wait time of over an hour and 30 minutes
for a pie and in the end there were four
people working in a space the size of a
restroom. That's when we decided to go
the easiest and fastest route and it would
allow us to grow instantaneously with less
investment, so we bought a 8'x20' trailer
and doubled our capacity overnight. We
added an extra oven and more refrigeration
and now had the capacity of baking eight
pies at a time, that with all our prep
and dough now being done out of our
commissary kitchen made us grow over
200 percent in comparison to the previous
year. It's crazy to think that we sell more
out of this trailer now than my uncle used
to sell at his pizza place, but we've also
pretty much hit a wall again. Next step,
brick and mortar.
JULY 2023 / PIZZATODAY.COM / 45
http://www.PIZZATODAY.COM
Pizza Today - July 2023

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