By Charlie Pogacar
Purdue University is known for producing some of the finest engineers in the country. So when Brad Niemeier made his presentation for the Burton D. Morgan Business Plan Competition—an annual contest that promotes student entrepreneurship—it’s safe to assume he was the first person to ever lead with a clip from Seinfeld.
In the clip, Kramer—the show’s lovably eccentric character who lives across the hall from Jerry Seinfeld—presents his business plan for a pizzeria where you make your own pizza. Niemeier let that sink in with the judges. “And then I showed this big gap in the fast-casual pizza market,” Niemeier, founder of Azzip Pizza, recently recalled to PMQ. “At the time—this was in 2012—there really were just a couple of brands that had started [offering build-your-own pizzas], but nobody had really become a household name doing it.”
Kramer’s vision was, to put it lightly, completely insane: He suggested each customer would cook their own pizza, to which George Costanza memorably quipped, “You can’t have people shoving their arms into a 600-degree oven!” Niemeier’s idea was far more intriguing and sensible: He wanted to create the “Subway of pizza,” where customers move down the line and choose ingredients to be put on their pizza.
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It’s a model that was later popularized by fast-casual behemoths like MOD Pizza, but Niemeier’s presentation honed in on the fact that nobody was doing it in the Purdue area, at least certainly not at scale. His argument swayed the judges, and Niemeier, against all odds, took home the $20,000 grand prize in the undergraduate division. Considering the competition he was up against, it was an upset victory.
“I did not believe I had a chance of winning,” Niemeier said. “One of the other teams was creating wound-healing technology or something like that—these were extremely smart kids—and here I am with an idea for a pizza restaurant. It was the simplest idea—but I think that’s what made it so salient in the judge’s minds. It was so simple, and I think even they were like, yeah, why is nobody doing this?”
As MOD and other fast-casual pizza brands were scaling nationally, Niemeier was quietly building his own pizza chain: Azzip Pizza, which has grown to 11 locations across Indiana and Western Kentucky. The chain will soon open a location in West Lafayette—home of Purdue, where it all started—and another in Terre Haute, home to Indiana State University. The chain recently announced its 2024 systemwide sales were up 8%—an impressive achievement during any year, but especially one that saw fast-casual chains like MOD and Blaze Pizza struggle.
That’s not to suggest Azzip’s success was linear. There was a lot of trial and error, much of which was conducted in anonymity. Upon graduating from Purdue, Niemeier lived in his parent’s basement for two years, further honing his business plan alongside the culinary brains behind the operation, chef Blake Kollker. He had been introduced to Kollker through mutual friends and found him to be somebody who boasted an impressive resume on the Nashville culinary scene but had moved back home to Evansville, Indiana, where Azzip would end up launching its first location, to be closer to family.
The duo landed on the thin, cracker-crust pizza style that is so popular in the Midwest, partially because it would cook quickly and help get people through the line. From the very start, Azzip only offered 8” and 11” pizzas, to further personalize the experience. If Azzip’s build-your-own service format was inspired by Subway, so, too were the pizza sizes.
“We always thought of it like the 6” and 12” [subs],” Niemeier said. “I think that really set us apart early on, where you’ve got a smaller size, and, if there’s somebody who likes to eat a lot of food, you have that bigger option, too.”
When Azzip opened its first restaurant in Evansville’s Westside neighborhood in 2014, Niemeier knew two things for sure. The first was that he was onto something: The city was hyped about Azzip Pizza.
“The response was overwhelming,” Neiemeier said. “When we opened, we were in Evansville, which is where I grew up. I had family and connections where I knew I could get people to try it once. But the first week was crazy. That Friday, it was really busy, and we ran out of pizza dough. I don’t know how many times I had to go out to the dining room and be like, ‘Alright guys. I’m sorry: we have 12 pizzas left.’ I’d go down the line and count the first 12 people and then tell everybody else we were [sold] out so they were standing in line only to find out we didn’t have pizza left.”
The second thing Niemeier learned was that the restaurant business was as hard as, or perhaps harder than, he had imagined. He was, in effect, building the plane as he was flying it.
“If I look back at how we started things and how we did everything,” Niemeier said, “I mean… there’s not a single thing we still do that way. It’s been like 10 years, and now we have more than 10 locations. I’m telling you, there’s not a single thing that is done the exact same way.
So what, exactly, changed, and how did it change? As an example, Niemeier points to how they used to weigh every single dough ball by hand. He remembers seeing an advertisement for a dough portioner and feeling like it was a revelation. “There’s been a ton of things like that over the years that have just really added up,” Neimeier said.
One of Azzip’s biggest hits during its first year came from Kollker’s sharp culinary mind. To properly celebrate the NCAA Tournament, the operators knew they wanted to do something to appeal to Indiana’s hoops-crazed demographic. Kollker came up with the March Crabness: a crab rangoon specialty pizza that is now an annual tradition for the brand that draws a feverish following. The March Crabness pie now makes up 30% of Azzip’s sales each March.
“When I tell you this pizza has loyal fans, we’ll have people that come 30 times in a month [just to get a March Crabness each day],” Niemeier said. “And then the last time they come, they’ll buy 10 more for their freezer.”
The Crab Rangoon-inspired pie has become emblematic of Azzip’s menu, where no culinary idea is too crazy to consider. Another hugely popular specialty pizza Kollker cooked up early on was the Westsider, where he took a locally famous item, Grippo’s BBQ Potato Chips, and paired it with mozzarella, pork, onion and a house-made “ski” reduction sauce (a syrupy sauce made from Ski Citrus Soda). “I remember putting that on Facebook, and it just blew up,” Niemeier said. The Westsider is now a staple on the menu.
As Niemeier says, “If we can put it on a pizza, it’s going on a pizza.” The loyalty for items like the March Crabness and the Westsider also inspired a unique subscription-style promotion at all of Azzip’s locations: the Pizza of the Month (POTM) Club. Here’s how it works: Customers pay about $100 at the beginning of the year for a free POTM pie each month, a special that comes straight from the brain of Kollker. They also enjoy perks like the opportunity to weigh in on future POTMs. A recent example is the Texas Turn Up—a brisket burnt ends pizza—which captured about 9% of sales during its month to shine.
As Azzip has continued to grow, it has stayed true to its family-run, independent roots. Upon retiring from his original career, Niemeier’s dad began helping Azzip and designed nine store buildouts for the brand. Both of Niemeier’s brothers joined the effort, as did his mother, who still runs the books. One of Niemeier’s brothers, Andy, is co-CEO alongside Brad.
The family members work well together, but Niemeier said, “It’s definitely come with its share of challenges, because Andy and I are so different, too. He’s the engineering kind of mindset… and he’s probably also the smartest person I know. He was the top Vanderbilt MBA student in his class. When we went to the award ceremony at his graduation—I’ll never forget this—they’re like, ‘Here are our top two students: One is going to work at Deloitte, and the other is going to work at Azzip Pizza.’”
Having those bright minds as part of the operation made Azzip what it is today. The growth has come deliberately, and the family’s current philosophy is that they don’t want to open any stores that they can’t drive to and from in one day—a range, they figure, of roughly four hours. Fortunately, if you look at a map of the Evansville region, that four-hour drive time gives them a wide selection of metro areas, from St. Louis to Louisville to Nashville and other cities.
“It’s why we’re not franchising,” Niemeier said of Azzip’s style of growth. “Every store is company-owned. We’re growing that way because what we really want is for Azzip to be a really strong regional chain. One of the brands I think about a lot is In-N-Out: For years, they just grew in California. It was years and years before they got to a point where they were growing elsewhere.”
“Another reason for that is just the work-life balance,” Niemeier adds. “I want to be able to go and visit my stores. It’s why we aren’t getting too far ahead of ourselves any time soon.”
