Azzip Pizza celebrates 10 years of premium products and connected culture
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Evansville-based Azzip Pizza, a restaurant chain specializing in customized pizzas, celebrated its 10th birthday last month. The first location opened on Evansville’s west side on February 5, 2014. Today, Azzip has 11 restaurants in Indiana and Kentucky, the most recent location opening on Dec. 18, 2023, on the northwest side of Indianapolis.
Brad Niemeier, Azzip’s founder and CEO, cooked up the business idea during his college days at Purdue University in West Lafayette, where he was a walk-on football player.
“I would have teammates over and everybody would throw in $5 or $10 for the ingredients and we’d get to make up a bunch of pizzas. I just really enjoyed seeing people eat pizza and have fun with it,” he said.
Niemeier said the combination of premium pizzas and a connected team of employees has contributed to Azzip’s growth and success.
“We’ve got a high-quality product and the value proposition of personal pizza that you get to make however you want and building it right in front of customers is just a great value,” he said.
How it started, how it’s going
While Niemeier pursued hospitality and tourism management and a certificate in entrepreneurship at Purdue, he began brainstorming ways to make a pizza restaurant unique.
“We went to Chipotle all the time, and I loved that concept of seeing it made right in front of you and the high-quality ingredients and all that. So that mashup of pizza and Chipotle led to the idea for Azzip,” Niemeier said.
Niemeier entered his idea into Purdue’s Burton D. Morgan Business Model Competition and won $20,000 in 2012 to launch the business. He brought his plan back to Evansville, recruited the help of family and friends, including Chef Blake Kollker, and started selling pizzas two years later.
“The Westsider was our first creative pizza that we came up with. It had Grippos and Ski on it and pulled pork. So we decided to give that away for $2.14 [on February 5, 2024] to throwback to 2014,” Niemeier said.
Azzip features a different pizza each month, including Chicken on the Beach, You’re Un-Fajita-ble and Chicky-Chicky Parm-Parm. In March, the restaurant gets in on the NCAA basketball tournament action with March Crabness, a crab rangoon-style pizza.
“Our average pizza of the month is about 10% or so of all sales for the month, from a menu mix perspective. And the March Crabness is 30% of all of our pizzas this month. So it’s a wildly popular pizza,” Niemeier said.
Azzip’s commitment to creating unique flavor combinations and offering options like zero-carb pizza crust helped the company take home the Menu Innovation award presented by Pizza Marketplace last year in Las Vegas.
“It was a cool recognition of that program and competing against all the other pizza brands. It was a fun award to be able to receive in recognition for those creative pizzas,” said Andy Niemeier, brother of Brad Niemeier and Azzip’s co-CEO.
Azzip also sponsors the We Give A’Zip Giveback Program, which supports not-for-profits in the communities where the 11 restaurants are located.
“It’s well over $300,000 now given back to local organizations in those 10 years. It’s just another big part of our business of being able to support those organizations that have helped get us where we are,” Brad Niemeier said.
10 years of growth
According to Andy Niemeier, part of Azzip’s growth and success over the past 10 years has to do with a focused effort on creating a good working environment.
“It’s just fundamentally core to how we want to run our business, but it also helps benefit customers and helps enable that success,” he said. “We’re doing something right that engages [employees] and makes them feel like we value them and they enjoy serving our customers and working around each other. All those things just snowball in a good way.”
Azzip’s work to build strong teams and a great culture paid off when COVID hit.
“Even as it got worse for us, we were always fully staffed, in the sense that we never had to reduce hours or cut days because we couldn’t staff our restaurants fully,” Andy Niemeier said.
The pandemic forced Azzip to make several changes—that would eventually have been made from a business model standpoint—at an accelerated pace.
“We didn’t have [online ordering] at all before COVID. We wanted everybody to come in and enjoy the experience in the store. So going from not doing that at all, and for a bit there, 100% of our business, and now it’s about 20% to 25% of our business for online versus in-store,” said Brad Niemeier.
As Azzip expanded into other Indiana cities and Kentucky, Brad Niemeier said keeping up with operations became challenging.
“How do you keep those teams engaged in Azzip and doing the right things and making sure that we’re able to have a presence in the store and have that same culture in Lafayette as we do in Evansville?” he said. “That’s something we’ve gotten better at and are more connected now than we’ve been probably ever in terms of being on the same page from store to store.”
Azzip’s new restaurant in Indianapolis is the city’s second location and the first new restaurant since 2020.
“It’s good to finally be back on that new store growth and opening new locations and getting to spread Azzip to new customers. We’ve had a really nice response so far, and a lot of people have loved it. And a lot of people from Evansville or Bloomington or Lafayette or Terre Haute, now they’ve got an Azzip near them again, and they’re excited about it,” Brad Niemeier said.
The goal for future Azzip expansion is to stay within three hours of Evansville.
“To know our employees, to be able to see those familiar faces when we go into the stores and grow with that model of being able to expand close to home,” said Brad Niemeier.
‘A clean future’
Another new feature at Azzip is the installation of a solar energy system at the company’s headquarters on W. Franklin St. in Evansville.
“It was a good opportunity to invest in a clean future … starting with our office space. We’d love to expand that across some of our other footprints and stores, but it’s a little harder. This is the only property of ours that we own and control that decision point,” said Andy Niemeier.
Morton Solar & Electric flipped the switch on the 17.6 kilowatt DC solar energy system last month. Brad Morton, the company’s president, said his daughter, a former Azzip employee, brought the idea to the Niemeiers.
“She approached them and presented them with an economic evaluation. And they get a 40% tax credit, so it makes economic sense for them,” he said.
Morton said one of the misconceptions about solar energy is that the system has to be all or nothing.
“That you must either be 100% solar or zero, and that’s not true. You can be 25% or you can be 75% or anywhere in between,” he said. “One example that we’ve done previously is Sandy’s Pizza. They are about 90% powered by solar. It’s in Fort Branch.”
Mortons said Azzip’s new solar energy system will save money on electricity and reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
“There’s more tax credits now for businesses, and there’s a USDA [Rural Energy for America Program] grant that businesses can take advantage of. You can probably get 75% to 90% of the system paid for if you are eligible for both,” he said.