Convenience is key to fast-casual food.
The faster! easier! mantra clicked again for consumers with Subway in the 1970s, was refined by Chipotle 25 years ago, and amassed major momentum over the past decade.
The movement grew into hundreds of variations that foodies can roll and slice through like a pizza cutter.
But what could be faster and easier—and more convenient—than never leaving home?
Speaking of pizza, that’s the question Tim and Tera Case have been answering since they started Santa Ana-based BakerStone International in 2012, a maker of small ovens that fit on outdoor grills and indoor stovetops and deliver pizza and other entrees in minutes.
“Our record is 53 seconds,” Tim said.
It’s an upgrade that elevated the Cases to this year’s Business Journal Family-Owned Business award in the Up and Coming Company category (see related stories pages 1, 4 and 8).
Ironic Sauce
Their starting out with pizza demonstrated both a natural progression and irony, because fast-casual pizza is a key genre—and Tim almost helped write it.
He noticed the trend, and like any red-blooded American thought, pizza!
“I could take [Chipotle] and reinvent it. There was nothing in the market.”
That was in the mid-2000s. He was in business banking in OC, and a client was launching a franchise consultancy. A building in Fullerton was available, but Tim and Tera couldn’t get backing. A year later, Pieology Pizzeria opened a mile from the site they’d sought.
Nearly nothing came of all the effort.
Blood Lines
One thing did: fascination with Neapolitan cooking, especially its authenticity and quality.
“I grew up in Chicago and loved pizza, but what made me explore this was the artisan side,” Tim said.
Fast-casual is about convenience, but fast food already promised that; the advance came in food prep and results.
Neapolitan cooking is a “3,000-year-old technology” with a key component, he said: wood fire.
He started asking questions. He tried to modify existing technology. He tried to convince Tera to put a wood-fired oven in their kitchen.
“She laughed and said, ‘You’ve got a grill.’”
Then “a maker in Italy came out with what I was trying to do,” so fiddling with pizza stones and aluminum foil from his exile on the patio, a “portable and commercially viable” adaptation became the aim—“how can this massive oven be made manageable?”
Family Fun
Pizza Hut and Domino’s delivered—“Get the door: It’s Domino’s” was the slogan—and store-bought brands chimed in—“It’s not delivery, it’s DiGiorno!”—but here’s another quirk of the Cases’ study: fast-food took families out of the home; fast-casual let them enjoy the effort.
BakerStone circles them back.
Tim loves pizza, and Tera’s worked in hospitality at country clubs and resorts, so caring for people with food is in their blood.
For the Kickstarter campaign that helped launch the company, they filmed family and frie nds and a product prototype. Tim had made a “bad infomercial” style video, but Tera said, “It wasn’t fun.”
Heating Up
Tim said, “We ended up scrapping the first video for what we shot as B-roll stuff: a pizza party.”
Kickstarter got the dough rolling, but it’s the family focus that sustains, along with the occasional irony.
A recent cookout for 30 people had the BakerStone couple cooking carne asada on a single-burner camping grill.
BakerStone products are in big-box retailers and online, and new products, including “outdoor living innovations, are on the way. The Business Journal estimates annual revenue at $4 million this year and $10 million next year.
“Our ovens cook everything you can cook at home, better,” Tim said.
And yet, of their 13 employees Tera said, “Our family works here. An old friend from Pelican [Hill resort] works here. Our kids are in here at least once a week—and they know who has the candy.”
