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Airport Pizza is the first of its kind for the Northwest Alaskan region of Nome. Owners Jeri Ann and Matt Tomter decided Nome and its surrounding 14 villages needed a way to get good pizza, so they came up with the idea of flying special ordered, gourmet pizzas into the bush villages, which range in distances up to 250 miles away. “Before we were open, Nome had to be the last town in America that didn’t have pizza delivery,” Matt said in an article from the Anchorage Daily News.
Just Getting Started
“Where we are, there aren’t any road systems that come here. Everything comes by air or, in the summer, by barge or ship, so the biggest thing we had to do was find an oven,” Matt said. After a large fire claimed several buildings in Nome, including Tomter’s carpet cleaning service, Matt said he found a large pizza oven buried under some of the debris. “I asked the man who owned the place how much he wanted for the oven, and he said, ‘If you get it out of here, it’s free,’ so I figured we could make some money with it.” Matt had the Montague 24P oven moved into his new pizza shop, which is based at the Nome airport. “The biggest problem was that we wrote the menus before we ever made the pizzas, so we wanted to make sure they tasted as good as we thought they did. It’s the slate bottom on our oven that makes the pizzas and the crust really good,” Matt said.
You Buy, We Fly
Airport Pizza, which opened its doors for business in August, 2005, has been steadily busy with orders since its inception. “Our biggest day was opening day, when we sold 197 pizzas,” Matt said. “Most Fridays we’re doing about 100 pizzas.” Jeri Ann said 60 percent of their business is within the city of Nome, but their main focus has been catering to the bush. Airport Pizza’s motto is, “You buy, we fly!” The service is provided for free by Frontier Flying Service, who fly to the villages on a daily basis. “Each day, there are at least two flights to each village. So, if you call at noon and the flight leaves at four o’clock, we’ll have the pizza ready at 3:45 and just stick it right on the plane before takeoff,” Matt said. The service is available to Airport Pizza for free because they have co-opped with Frontier Flying Service. Instead of a monetary exchange for Frontier flying the pizzas into the villages, Airport Pizza prints all of Frontier’s contact information and advertising needs on the pizza box tops.
“We have an 800 number that comes into our facility. So, if you want to order a pizza from one of the remote villages, you just call up our number, place the order, pay for it with either a credit card or cash that has been sent in advance, and we’ll make the pizzas up and send them out on the next flight,” Matt said. Although the pizzas won’t get there immediately (sometimes it’s the next day or later that same afternoon), Matt says the people still love the fact that they are getting good, fresh pizza with quality ingredients, and it’s being delivered. Once the plane has landed in the village, the customers meet the airplane on the runway and get their pizzas from the pilot. “We usually cook the pizzas about three-quarters of the way, and encourage the customers to finish cooking them in their own ovens,” Matt said. With the cold weather and often hour-long flights to the villages, the hot bags don’t keep the pizzas warm enough to fully cook them and still taste fresh when they reach the customer, so Airport Pizza leaves the pies unsliced and ready to finish in a home oven.
“There’s a couple of other places that make pizza in Nome. One’s owned by a Korean family and one’s owned by a Chinese family—neither of which know anything about pizza. They just use canned products and low-quality ingredients, so to come in and make a better pizza was easy,” he said. Matt also said that Airport Pizza is now the only place in Nome where people get their pizzas. “If we were anywhere else in the world, our pizza would be comparable to some of the higher end pizzas. Our competition uses canned mushrooms and canned sauce, so it really just wasn’t that hard to make a better pizza.”
Marketing
Airport Pizza has not done a significant amount of advertising. “It’s a small community and everybody kind of knows everybody and talks about what’s good and what’s not,” Jeri Ann said. They have used some radio ads and have posted flyers in various stores in their delivery area. She said each village has a main grocery store and that’s where they post their flyers. “It just doesn’t take that much out here, especially since there’s hardly any competition. We’re the only ones that deliver, so we’re the only ones people use,” Matt said. “The most effective advertising we have found is faxing. We have fax numbers to all the businesses in the Nome area, so we just start faxing people.” He said they fax flyers with their specials about once or twice a month to the area businesses. “The only cost is long distance for some of the calls, but it’s basically a free form of advertisement,” Matt said. “It’s a small community and everybody kind of knows everybody and talks about what’s good and what’s not,” Jeri Ann said.
Dishing it out
Matt said the weather in Alaska is always unpredictable, so there’s never any guarantee that an order will get in on time. “There’s days when the weather’s so bad that we may not receive our cheese or produce and we’re scrambling to make all the pizzas for the day. Getting stuff here is probably one of the hardest parts about it, because everything has to be shipped from Anchorage, which is over 1,000 miles away,” Matt said.
Some specialty pizzas on their menu include the Reindeer Sausage, a medium with real reindeer meat provided by Indian Valley Meats in Anchorage costs 24 dollars, the Thai Chicken, which has a special spicy Thai peanut sauce in place of pizza sauce costs 24 dollars for a medium, and the Chicken Rockefeller, which includes a garlic butter sauce, cream cheese, and spinach, can be had for 25 dollars for a medium. With over 30 different specialty pizzas, calzones, and dessert pizzas, Airport Pizza is flying high in the world of gourmet offerings. Matt and his wife Jeri Ann have future plans of building an additional Airport Pizza restaurant with full-service and seating. Visit their website at www.airportpizza.com.