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Can you imagine walking into a futuristic pizza shop designed with the latest technology in mind? The future is here with the Dough Boy Pizza franchises opening up across the U.S. from east to west.
A food entrepreneur, restaurateur and chef developed the concept while building her Southern Culture Foods (SOCU) brand in Alabama. “I said I don’t think anybody is thinking like this. Let’s pull in all of these partners and build a restaurant of the future that is solution-based and does not run off of old technology. Let’s use the latest technology,” says Erica Barrett, founder of Dough Boy Pizza.
Barrett’s first technology-forward pizza shop opened in August of 2022. Today, the company has five Dough Boy Pizza franchises in Alabama, Georgia and Arizona. “I’m sitting here with my Dough Boy letterman jacket on, my all-black uniform and headed to another location. We have multiple locations. It’s mind-blowing to me. I haven’t even absorbed it yet,” the Atlanta entrepreneur admits.
Dough Boy Pizza Rises to the Challenge
Barrett was already working on launching the second location of her SOCU Southern Kitchen & Oyster Bar inside The Pizitz Food Hall in Birmingham, Alabama, when the owners presented her with a challenge. “They said we’ve been trying to get pizza here for five or six years, and nobody could do it. We tried to pull in every company we could but haven’t been able to serve pizza, and people are asking for it,” Barrett recounts.
She researched pizza stores while finalizing plans for her SOCU restaurant at the food hall. The COVID pandemic was still with us when Barrett presented the Pizitz’s owners with a plan to build a pizza shop serving handmade Neapolitan crusts baked in a wood-fired oven.
“I sent over the plans and equipment schedule for what I wanted to order, and they turned me down,” the restaurateur admits. “They said, ‘This is a historic building. We could mess up the structure with something that heavy.”’
Dough Boy Pizza’s owner refused to give up. She attended a National Restaurant Association trade show looking for inspiration and found it. Barrett cultivated a partnership with the owner of an Italian company that makes a modern, portable pizza oven and Neapolitan pizza dough. “I met a pizza partner that supplies us with our ovens and crusts. I don’t need a vent hood or a grease trap now,” says Barrett.
The decision to incorporate the latest technology into her plan for a fast-casual pizza restaurant is paying off. Dough Boy Pizza has no cashiers. Nor do the stores have cooks who spend long hours making dough. The shops use self-ordering kiosks, radiant technology and artificial intelligence to create chef-driven, quality pizzas that are made in a few minutes and have lower labor costs.
“Before, opening a restaurant would cost someone hundreds of thousands of dollars, but I opened my first pizza shop with $15,000. If we weren’t in the age where there is so much information at our fingertips, it wouldn’t have been able to be done,” the pizza company CEO acknowledges.
Dough Boy Pizza’s first customers in Birmingham adapted to the self-order kiosks and other high-tech features without hesitation. “They didn’t flinch. They didn’t complain. Tapping on a self-ordering screen is like tapping on your phone,” Barrett indicates. “Once Dough Boy opened, it was a 100-square-foot masterpiece. I had never opened up something so small in my life. I wanted to share it with the world.”
Delivering Chef-Driven Dough Boy Pizza
The first Dough Boy Pizza stall and the 4,000-square-foot SOCU Southern Kitchen & Oyster Bar closed at The Pizitz Food Hall after Barrett moved her business operations to Atlanta. However, her mini-culinary empire continues to thrive in Alabama and Georgia.
A SOCU restaurant operates at the Mobile International Airport, and the downtown Mobile location is under renovation. This spring, a new corporate Dough Boy Pizza is slated to open. The flagship 1,500-square-foot facility will sell chef-driven Neapolitan pizzas in Fayetteville, Georgia. The innovative pizza shop will also serve as a training facility for franchise employees.
“I want customers to experience good, authentic Italian pizza. I’m doing that as a Black girl, a colored girl. We can do things outside of what we are traditionally expected to do, like fried chicken and collard greens. We can make great pizza, too!” Barrett emphasizes.
Early on, Barrett recognized the need to build a manufacturing facility to distribute Dough Boy’s Italian ingredients imported from Naples, as well as the company’s house-made sauce and other specialty items to the franchises.
“We currently provide our franchisees with pizza sauce, braised oxtails, caramelized onions and things that were hard for us to find ready-made. We’re adding some other proprietary items this year that we will make in-house for our stores,” says the pizza company’s owner.
Dough Boy’s thin-crust pizzas can be ordered with traditional pepperoni and sausage toppings or unique choices like short rib and crawfish. “Chef quality is really about sourcing great ingredients. We use San Marzano tomatoes. They’re imported from Italy too. We use authentic Italian olive oil. With our sourcing, we curate high-quality products so you can have an awesome pizza,” the chef comments.
Fully robotic food delivery systems do exist in the world. Barrett shares why she chose to have employees assemble and bake each pizza the customers self-order. “For now, the chef in me says touch that pie, fix that pizza, and still put love in it. Just use as much technology as possible to run a smarter, faster and better restaurant.”
Dough Boy Pizza Pays It Forward
The visionary entrepreneur reports her company is working to finalize 25 franchise locations already in the planning stages throughout the U.S. That demonstrates Barrett’s commitment to Dough Boy Pizza being a game-changer in the franchise industry.
Franchise Direct estimates show costs ranging from more than $100,000 to over $4 million to invest in one of 10 popular fast food franchises, including McDonald’s, Subway, Pizza Hut and Domino’s. In addition, investors must pay a franchise fee and prove they have enough liquid cash and net worth to sustain the business, which requires hundreds of thousands more in financial assets.
“We know most people don’t have that, and their dreams of entrepreneurship are crushed, especially if they’ve never been entrepreneurs. We want to remove the barriers and solve that problem for people who can’t typically get into this business. We want to give you the tools of success and watch you succeed,” says Barrett.
The culinary mogul points out Dough Boy Pizza franchisees require no prior experience in the food industry. Instead, her company looks for talent and skill sets that are a good fit. Celebrity radio host Ryan Cameron is the first person to invest in one of the high-tech Neapolitan pizza shops. The Majic 107.5/97.5 DJ’s pizza store opened in an underserved Decatur community in the Gallery at South DeKalb. When Ryan Cameron’s Dough Boy Pizza arrived in 2023, the mall only had two food stalls. The popular broadcaster is considering opening more Dough Boy franchises in Georgia.
Barrett reveals how she and Cameron connected. “Ryan was intrigued with the smart pizza concept and saw my vision for wanting to run a pizza shop of the future. We had a conversation and sat down over dinner. He loved the pizza space. He decided very quickly to ink a deal and started working with us. We’ve been very fortunate to have him with us.”
Low start-up and operating costs attract budding entrepreneurs to the Dough Boy Pizza franchise. “Typically, labor costs are about 28 to 35% in restaurants. We’re about 10 to 15% with Dough Boy because we do not have cashiers. In addition, we also don’t take on the labor cost of making dough in-house,” Barrett remarks.
Dough Boy’s franchise team also reduces the investment capital needed by looking at previously owned restaurants for locations. That way, franchisees can avoid putting in $300,000 or more to build a new shop from the ground up. They can also rely on Barrett’s manufacturing facility to deliver the ingredients for Dough Boy pizzas.
The CAU Collective, a group of four Clark Atlanta University graduates, rolled out the second Dough Boy Pizza location last year. Kim Harris, Danielle Scarborough, Stacey Lee Spratt and Dalen Spratt partnered with James Beard Award nominee Harlem Hops, proprietors of Manhattan’s first Black-owned craft beer bar.
CAU’s Lee + White Food Hall pizza store will introduce Atlanta customers to Harlem Hops beer. The owners also plan to start a scholarship program for HBCU students.
So what drives Barrett’s passion for paying it forward with Dough Boy Pizza franchises? Some of her inspiration comes from the gift NoJa restaurant owner Chakli Diggs gave her before her first SOCU Southern Kitchen & Oyster Bar opened in 2019.
It began with a pop-up she catered at his former Saisho restaurant in Mobile. Diggs introduced her to the building’s owner, turned over his lease and gave her all the furniture and equipment at the Dauphin Street location.
“The chef said if you allow me to mentor you, I’ll give you this restaurant. He mentored me for eight months and helped me with my first concept. Eight months later, he gave me a bill of sale for $10 and said, ‘This restaurant is yours.’ I have a responsibility as a chef to pay it forward to others.”
BBQ Brawl Raises Dough Boy Pizza Brand
Giving back mattered to the chef, cookbook author and founder of SOCU Foods years before she created Dough Boy Pizza. The New York International Culinary Center graduate gained public recognition by appearing on ABC TV’s “Shark Tank” and CNBC’s “The Profit. Most recently, she attracted attention for her brand by winning Food Network’s “BBQ Brawl” as a Bobby Flay team member.
“You work hard and cook. You make a living by making food for people and they tell you it is good. But when Bobby Flay of Food Network tells you it’s good, that’s different. That validation helps. It keeps you going,” the chef says.
The famous Flay chose Barrett from among the 12 talented barbecue chefs preparing to compete in BBQ Brawl Season 5, which premiered last July. “I had no clue that Bobby would pick me first. I’m feeling the emotion again right now. At that moment, my heart was crying tears of joy. Like, ‘What God? First? I’m feeling like an NBA Draft pick,”’ she reminisces.
Flay called Barrett’s food craveable, and the show’s judges named the self-made entrepreneur “Master of Cue.” Barrett expresses her gratitude. “That show meant a lot. It helped me evolve as a more confident chef. But also made me think about these crazy ideas that I’ve got; they aren’t so crazy after all. The world needs these concepts. You were meant to be here, you belong, and there’s a place for you.”
The show’s validation of her culinary talents reinforced Barrett’s commitment to helping others succeed in the food industry. She uses her experience as a CEO to guide other specialty food producers.
Her factory packages and distributes the SOCU gourmet pancake and waffle mixes, fried chicken mix, stone ground grits and bacon bits that the chef started selling over a decade ago. The facility now co-packages products for other independent entrepreneurs. Barrett assisted 11 different companies with launching 33 products last year.
Her friend and owner of NouVeau Bar & Grill, Ebony Austin, is one of them. “She came to me wanting to start her own product line. And now her flavored grits are in over 260 stores. If I can make that kind of impact on a person, it is way more important than talking about what I have done,” suggests Dough Boy Pizza’s founder.
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Dough Boy Pizza’s Divine Ingredient
Chef Barrett spent around $2 million of her own money building up her parent company’s Southern cuisine product line, restaurants and manufacturing plant. She recently partnered with investors for the first time to better manage the growth of Dough Boy Pizza.
“I am in awe. We’re a real company with people, employees and executives. All from that tiny stall,” she declares. “We brought on an executive staff, and we have a director of operations who is creating an audit team to go out and maintain our standards.”
The Atlanta businesswoman refers to her accomplishments as slow growth achieved through many trials and tribulations over 15 years of hard work in the culinary field. Barrett continually proclaims the significance of a divine ingredient in Dough Boy Pizza and all her successes: relying on God as her top advisor.
“Isn’t God awesome? I have no answer outside of waking up every day and asking God what He wants me to do today,” says Barrett. “God gives me the strength and the direction. I mean, my day started at five this morning. I’ve probably been on 11 calls.”
Even with her days jam-packed with phone conversations, meetings and other demands, Chef Barrett never forgets what she considers her true divine calling, creating concepts that improve the chances for others to own and operate food businesses.
“I wake up so grateful every day. I am the luckiest girl in the world. God—I’ve really got to be the apple of his eye. He allows me to wake up, cook every day, make a living and have people recognize it,” she continues.
“When I see other people win and become successful in food because I’ve had a chance to work with them, that makes me happy. It’s not just about me. It’s about community, it’s about us, and it’s about making the world a better place.”
Follow Erica Barrett on social media @iamericabarrett, @socukitchen or @soquebbq. Get the latest on her pizza company @officialdoughboypizza.