By Charlie Pogacar
About nine minutes into the latest episode of Peel: A PMQ Pizza Podcast, special guest Michael Fox admitted something. He has no idea how he—founder of Pizza Club, a virtual community for pizza makers and enthusiasts—became part of the pizza industry.
“I don’t know, Charlie, I really don’t,” Fox said on the podcast. “I was just there. I wanted to foster this thing because we all were feeling it…There were people that were part of [the pizza community] and we wanted to…create an environment where people could come and talk and hang out. It was a group effort.”
The quote seems to downplay the role Fox had in forming Pizza Club, which was a pandemic baby. Fox, founder and executive producer of his own video production agency, The Beach, had spent several years working with foodservice professionals, creating content. When lockdown came about, he learned about Clubhouse, the social app that allowed large groups of people to hang out virtually. He started listening to conversations between chefs as they chatted about work, life and what it was like to have their livelihoods taken away in the blink of an eye.
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“A lot of them were displaced chefs, or chefs who weren’t working as much, or had their businesses but they were a lot slower,” Fox said. “It was kind of like being at a bar, where people are just hanging out.”
Eventually, these conversations led Fox to the pizza community. An opportunity presented itself, he said, to begin connecting pizza professionals with one another, and Fox was at the heart of the effort to formally create an informal community.
“In the beginning, it was really just these wild conversations that went on for hours and hours on end about pizza,” Fox said. “It would be 1 [a.m.] in the morning, you know, and it’s still going on, and it kept building and building, and over the course of many months—and now years—we started formalizing things. [At some point], we were like, ‘We need to have shows and need to have programming and guests…it got a little more formalized and basically, we built it together. I was just there.’”
In this way, Fox is completely underselling his contributions to the pizza industry. Over the course of the past several years, many pizza makers have had their lives transformed by the community Fox has fostered. It’s a community that likely would not exist if it were not for Fox’s vision and dedication (and it’s important to note that Pizza Club is a passion project for Fox).
“Michael is genuinely the most humble, kind person,” said Sean Jefairjian, owner of A Slice of New York in Murrysville, Pennsylvania. Jefairjian began attending Pizza Club during the pandemic and opened his first pizzeria in the months after. “Ninety percent of the pizza friends I have are because of Michael. I don’t think he grasps the impact he has had on all of us. The people I have met through his club—because of him—have changed me forever.”
As Fox alluded to, Pizza Club now has regular programming scheduled. On Monday nights, Pizza Club hosts Pizza Industry Convos, featuring pizza makers and pizzeria owners sharing their experiences and insights with attendees. On Wednesdays, Jim Mumford and guest co-host Anna Crucitt run Pizza Roundtable, a show recapping the biggest pizza news stories of the week. A newer addition, Pizza Cultura is a show about the “news, facts, traditions and myths of the pizza world in Italy, Europe and beyond.”
Lately, Fox has worked on generating more video content for Pizza Club. He hopes the organization’s burgeoning YouTube channel will take off and begin a life of its own—after all, he’s still a videographer at heart. Fox could be seen all over the floor at the International Pizza Expo last week in Las Vegas, shooting video and socializing with friends old and new. It was just the latest chapter in Fox finding a home in the pizza industry—and creating a home for so many others.
“I think the most interesting part of the community is watching everybody help each other,” Fox said. “And I want to truly just help another person grow their business and start a business…It’s helped people figure out their problems. It’s like…you don’t need to struggle with this on your own. It’s been done before.”
To listen to this week’s full podcast, check out the following links:
