Eighteen months ago, fledgling entrepreneur Gail Becker gambled everything on her concept of a pizza with a cauliflower-based crust. It was such a big hit that she's selling a cauliflower crust pizza every three seconds.
Starting in 30 Whole Foods stores in March, 2017, Becker's Caulipower pizza line has surpassed sales of 10 million pizzas, and is available in an estimated 15,000 national and regional grocery stores, such as Kroger, Walmart and Safeway.
Now, her company, Vegolutionary Foods, is branching into new product lines, including a toast made from sweet potatoes that has just hit the market.
Becker estimates that Caulipower has 93 percent of the cauliflower crust pizza market, despite inroads by Trader Joe's and other manufacturers who have jumped into the cauliflower crust pizza market.
Her pizzas come in plain cheese, three cheese, margherita, veggie and two meat versions, one with uncured pepperoni and the other with turkey pepperoni. She also sells plain crusts and cauliflower-based baking mixes.
She says her success is based on a simple formula: the intersection of healthier eating, time and taste. "We don’t even market this as a gluten free pizza," Becker says. "It’s a great tasting pizza that’s better for you and happens to be gluten free."
Becker, whose background is in political and public communications, is a seasoned executive who was profiled by FORBES shortly before Caulipower launched.
Although you might be surprised at how quickly her cauliflower crust pizza has caught on, Becker says there was a big community of gluten-free and vegetarian eaters waiting for a plant-based product like the one she developed.
Indeed, experts say that the market for cauliflower-based foods is at least $17 million, while vegetable substitutes for noodles, rice and pasta has grown to at least $47 million, according to The New York Times.
She often searched Pinterest and other sites for ideas of dishes to feed her sons, who were diagnosed at a young age with celiac disease, meaning they cannot tolerate the gluten found in conventional bread and pizza dough. She discovered more than 500,000 recipes alone for gluten-free crusts.
"People are looking for ways to eat better. It’s really simple. That has always been the case. But now, one you have these whole communities online, helping each other, and sharing recipes," she says.
However, those recipes can be complicated, and Becker's first attempt at making a cauliflower pizza crust took 90 minutes. Even though it was a hit with her sons, "I thought, 'I cannot be the only one to find that 90 minutes is too much to make a pizza crust,'" she said.
But, seeing those hundreds of thousands of recipes made her think that cauliflower crust pizza had distinct commercial possibilities.
However, Becker says she knew that if she launched a cauliflower pizza crust product, it had better compare well with other frozen pizzas, not just vegan or vegetarian-focused products.
"We’re not yet at a point where we’re willing to sacrifice taste. There’s only so much we can eat on a daily basis, so it had better taste good," she says. "If I wasn't going to create a product that kids would want to eat, I wouldn't do it."
The development took a year, and Becker initially touted her pizza at a major industry trade show. A novice to working convention floors, she set up a booth using a tablecloth she bought at Target and a banner ordered from Zazzle.
Despite her no-frills approach, she says she was "inundated" with requests from vendors.
Soon after her launch, she attracted an initial investment from Boulder Food Group, joining a collection of small food brands that the venture capital firm has backed.
But Becker says was petrified when Trader Joe's introduced its own cauliflower pizza crust in May, 2017. "I thought, 'that's it,'" Becker said.
Later that year, though, Pop Sugar gave her pizza a ringing endorsement, saying its taste blew the Trader Joe's version out of the water. As a result, "our business exploded," Becker says.
I've tried both products, and Caulipower tastes much closer to a conventional thin crust pizza than the TJ's crust. Trader Joe's isn't deterred, however; it's added a multitude of cauliflower based products, both frozen and fresh.
Becker has continued to scour social media for ideas, and found inspiration for her newest product there. SweetPotatoasts is a thick slice of roasted sweet potato that can be used as a substitute for bread.
It comes in two flavors, plain and topped with olive oil and sea salt. The slices come frozen, and are then warmed up in the oven for a few minutes to crisp them up.
The SweetPotatoasts website shows them topped with the same kinds of ingredients that cafes use to build avocado and other types of toast, like Nutella and strawberries, peanut butter and banana, and savory versions, too.
"Whatever you put on toast, you can put on SweetPotatoast," says Becker.
Like the cauliflower pizza crust, they are gluten free and are vegan and Paleo diet friendly. As with her pizza, Becker says the new product is meant to save time.
"People were slicing a sweet potato lengthwise, and hopefully not cutting their hands, and then baking (the slices) for 45 minutes, and then toasting them," she says. "That means it's an hour to make sweet potato toast."
Becker acknowledges that some critics have questioned whether her gluten-free products are fads. "A lot of people have said, 'I don't know. What if this is just a trend? What are you going to do?'"
But, she says, "This is all different than kale in a number of ways. (With cauliflower crust pizza) I wanted to show that the concept wasn't cauliflower as a vegetable, but revolutionizing the use of vegetables as ingredients."
And while some people believe vegetables are best used fresh, Becker believes there's a benefit to frozen products.
"I like frozen. There’s a sentence I never thought I’d say," she says. "What we like to do is disrupt categories that haven’t been touched. Pizza hadn’t been disrupted since somebody put cheese in a crust."
