(Editor’s note: This is the third installment in a series about opening a mobile pizzeria by Jason Cipriani, co-owner of Sips & Pies. You can read the first part here and the second here.)

Last week, I detailed the thought exercises we went through when trying to decide if our pizzeria should do pop-ups, a brick-and-mortar location or a food truck. Once we decided a food truck was our future, there was an even bigger decision we needed to make: What kind of pizza did we want to sell?

One of my most memorable takeaways from taking Tony Gemignani’s Making Dough & Pizzas class at Pizza Expo 2024 was that you should decide the type of pizza you want to make, then choose an oven. It’s one of the biggest decisions you’ll make while planning your pizzeria – mobile or not – because it has a trickle-down effect on the rest of your business.

Detroit-style Pizza

Detroit-style pizza is hands-down my favorite style. I’m a sucker for thick, fluffy dough, a crispy frico and having the sauce on top of the cheese. My mouth is watering just thinking about it.

For the first year of slowly walking through this process, I had my heart set on selling Detroit-style pizza. It became a weekly staple on our family dinner menu as I experimented with dough, toppings and sauce. I searched the internet far and wide for mobile pizzerias that sold Detroit pizza and became somewhat obsessed with stalking the Instagram feeds of Izzy’s Pizza in Omaha, Nebraska, and the Blue Pan Food Truck in Denver, Colorado.

I scrolled through their posts looking for clues about how they solved the core problems I identified with serving Detroit-style pizza in a mobile setup: What oven did they use? How did they manage all the pans – both before and after bake? Did they par bake the dough to speed up ticket time? How much space did they need in their truck? What was their menu pricing like?

In the end, the totality of those questions led me to choose to serve Neapolitan-inspired pizza. But I’d say the biggest factor that influenced me to give up on selling Detroit pizza was the time it takes to bake one. I wanted ticket time to be as short as possible. Detroit pizzas take around 15 minutes – maybe longer if you have a really thick crust. And I like thick crust. Detroit will always have my heart.

Neapolitan-style Pizza

Even though I had my heart set on Detroit-style pizzas, I kept working on our Neapolitan-inspired dough and kept my mind open to a mobile unit that could accommodate portable propane-powered ovens. I loved the idea of customers being able to watch the entire process – including the bake – inside an oven. I wanted to provide a complete experience, not just take an order and a few minutes later hand a box to someone.

The core problems I wanted to solve with Neapolitan pizza centered around dough management. How many dough balls do you make? What do they weigh? What size(s) of pizza do you make? How do you manage dough in a hot pizza truck? (I had these same questions about managing dough for Detroit style pizzas as well, but I found myself preoccupied with the extra equipment the style demands.)

I began stalking the Denver-based food truck Outside Pizza on Instagram, trying to learn as much as I could from every photo and video they posted. Eventually, I emailed Outside Pizza owners Ashley Knotek and Ryan Grillaert, asking for advice. I explained my vision and goals and hoped they’d provide some guidance. A couple of weeks later, Grillaert emailed me back, offering just that – along with plenty of encouragement.

As I walked around the Pizza Expo show floor in 2024, after soaking in all of the advice from people with decades of experience running pizzerias, I made the decision to sell Neapolitan-style pizza. The decision distilled down to ticket times being shorter (in theory), simply because the bake only takes a couple of minutes. That’s it. I wanted to be able to turn out a large number of pizzas in a short amount of time, and I couldn’t mentally solve that problem for Detroit pizzas the way I could for Neapolitan.

With that single decision made, a million more waited, starting with what oven to use. It was probably the hardest decision for me during this entire process. I’ll walk you through that decision making process in next week’s column.

JASON CIPRIANI is the owner of Sips & Pies, a mobile wood-fired pizzeria serving Neapolitan-inspired pizza, in Colorado.