Story by Alexandra Mortati
This article is part of PMQ Pizza’s “12 Women to Watch“ series, in partnership with Women in Pizza and in celebration of Women’s Pizza Month. It’s an expanded version of the profile on Jess Oberlin featured in PMQ’s March 2026 issue.
Until a few years ago, pizza was simply something Jess Oberlin, owner of Hope’s New York-Inspired Pizza in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, loved to eat. Growing up in Canada, she developed an early fondness for the kind of pies common across the northeastern U.S. and eastern Canada—hearty New York–style pizzas with character and chew. But she never imagined it would become her career.
That changed in 2023, when Oberlin received news that brought her life to a screeching and frightening halt.
“I was diagnosed with colon cancer,” she recalls. “They told me, ‘We’ll try to make you better,’ but it had already spread to my liver. The whole world just stops.”
At the time, Oberlin was living in Eindhoven and working in the entertainment and culture sector as a freelancer. Despite the devastating diagnosis, she tried to keep moving forward. “My fiancé was amazing and so supportive,” she says. “I kept working and didn’t tell my clients I was sick unless I had to. I didn’t want to be a cancer patient—I wanted to get better.”
Eventually, she did. But once she received a clean bill of health, another realization began to set in: the life she had been living no longer felt right. She was burnt out. “I thought, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing with my life.’ I got panicky when opening emails.”
For months, she searched for a new direction. She considered everything from skilled trades to unconventional career paths that might allow her to do something meaningful—particularly in fields where women were underrepresented. Nothing clicked. Then one night, while watching “Munchies,” a series hosted by New York pizza maker Frank Pinello, Oberlin had a sudden realization. “I looked at my fiancé and said, ‘If I could choose to do one thing every day for the rest of my life, it would be pizza.’”
His response was simple: Do it.
“I have ADHD,” Oberlin notes with a laugh. “So the fact that I’ve been doing this for two years now is amazing.”
A Leap of Faith to New York
Instead of easing into the idea, Oberlin jumped in feet-first. She launched a GoFundMe campaign to fund a trip to New York City and set off with little more than determination and a list of pizzerias she hoped might let her learn a thing or two. “I started emailing all types of pizza places saying, ‘I’m going to open a pizza shop in the Netherlands. Can I come learn from you?’” she says. “Almost no one emailed me back.”
Still, she went.
The first few days in NYC were discouraging. Lousy weather kept her stuck in the apartment she had rented, wondering whether she had made a mistake. “It had been three days of rain, and I was sitting there thinking, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing here.’”
Then a chance meeting changed everything. Oberlin connected with someone in Brooklyn who introduced her to Jenny Olbrich, co-owner of the acclaimed pizzeria The Esters in Greenpoint. The two immediately clicked. “Jenny told me to come by the next day to make dough,” Oberlin recalls. “I was like, ‘Really? It’s that easy?’”
Compared with other kitchens that had offered only menial prep work, Olbrich opened the door to real hands-on learning. “It was a sign from the universe,” Oberlin says. “Like, you are going to make pizza.” Over three weeks in New York, she visited 13 pizzerias, soaking up ideas and techniques while studying under Olbrich and observing how the city’s pizza culture worked. “I loved that in New York you can meet random great people,” she says. “There’s so much openness around food and community.”
The experience gave her both technical knowledge and the confidence to begin building her own approach.
Finding Her Own Dough
Back in Eindhoven, Oberlin threw herself into experimentation. Every week she made pizzas and invited friends and customers to taste them. Soon she began hosting pop-ups, pushing herself to learn what it meant to cook for a crowd.
“I started with 50 pizzas at a pop-up and sold out in an hour,” she says. “Then I went up to 60 and sold out again. Then I went up to 75.”
At a major event during Dutch Design Week, she scaled up to 125 pizzas in a single night.
Running those events wasn’t easy. Oberlin had to juggle prep work, ovens, ticket management and logistics—often with only one helper. “In the kitchen you’re hustling,” she says. “The rushes are intense, but they’re fun.”
Despite the chaos of service, she fell in love with the dough-making process. “It gives me a sense of calm,” she says. “I’m not a super-chill person, so it reminds me to slow down.”
Her dough, in fact, reflects the patience she’s learned to embrace. Oberlin relies on extremely long fermentation times—usually between 72 and 100 hours, sometimes stretching to 124. “I try to always do long cold fermentation with pâte fermentée,” she explains. “I love the shape and how fluffy it is.”
The result often surprises first-time customers. “People go in thinking it’s going to be super heavy and a doughy mess, but it’s light and airy. And sometimes they leave having eaten two!”
Learning the Hustle
While developing her pizza recipes, Oberlin also worked part-time at a friend’s catering company to learn the rhythm of professional kitchens. “I needed to understand timing and scaling,” she says. “Managing tickets and ovens—that’s still a challenge for me.” The pop-ups, meanwhile, became a laboratory where she tested ideas, refined her dough and built a local following.
They also forced her to become creative about equipment and resources. “I decided to use whatever oven was already there,” Oberlin says. “I didn’t want to invest in equipment I wouldn’t use long if I eventually opened a shop.”
Sometimes those limitations produced unexpected innovations. After one slow pop-up left her with dozens of dough balls nearing the end of their fermentation cycle, Oberlin improvised: she baked the pizzas, froze them and reheated them later. And that experiment ultimately sparked a new direction for the business.
Rethinking Frozen Pizza
Originally, Oberlin’s goal was straightforward: build toward a brick-and-mortar pizzeria. But the frozen pizza idea kept evolving. “What I’m doing now is fully focused on scaling Hope’s Pizza in a way that stays true to why I started,” she explains.
Today, she is developing a system for fully pre-baked pizzas that are frozen, vacuum-sealed and reheated without sacrificing quality. “The pivot came from necessity at first,” Oberlin says. “But it’s become the most exciting part of the business.”
Instead of rushing into mass production, she’s experimenting with ways to preserve the craft. “I want to redesign the process so the pizza still tastes like it was made by hand—with long fermentation and care—even at larger volume. I’m in the testing phase now, developing systems, timing, packaging and logistics so that my pizza can live in freezers at bars, restaurants, hotels and eventually across borders. The goal is to make it possible for people everywhere to experience my pizza—not just those who happen to catch a pop-up in Eindhoven—and to prove that scaling doesn’t have to mean cutting all the corners when it comes to craft.”
Even as she explores wholesale opportunities, Oberlin hasn’t abandoned her original vision of hospitality. When she first imagined opening a restaurant, she pictured something like a diner counter—an intimate space where customers could talk with the person making their food.
“I’d want it to feel like hanging out on family night,” she says. “A cozy bar where people can talk to me and tell me what they think.” That idea of connection remains central to Hope’s Pizza. “I hope my pizza brings people together,” Oberlin says. “And maybe even changes how factories produce pizza at scale.”
The Meaning of Hope
It’s important to note that the name Hope’s Pizza carries deep personal significance to Oberlin. She named the business after her grandmother, Hope, who first inspired her love of food.
“She was my best friend,” Oberlin says. “I learned everything I know about food from her.”
One memory in particular stayed with her. “After her funeral, we ordered super-large pizzas,” she recalls. “We cried and danced while eating them.”
The moment captured something essential about pizza’s emotional power. “You eat pizza when you’re really sad and then you’re happier and maybe even more hopeful afterward,” Oberlin says. “You eat pizza when you’re really happy and you’re even happier after.”
The name also reflects Oberlin’s own second chance after cancer. “Because of the whole cancer thing, Hope’s is also a name for my new view on life,” she says. “I want to let everything be more positive and lighter. I did have cancer, and I am here. I am so hopeful that I will be healthy forever. It’s good to do something with those hopes—see, there’s the name again!—and not just let them exist in your mind.”
That sense of gratitude fuels her entrepreneurial risk. “If the business goes bust, at least I tried,” Oberlin says. “Life’s too short. I got a second chance to make it count.”
‘Get a Book and Do the Dough’
In the Netherlands, where pizza culture is still evolving, Oberlin has largely forged her own path. “I don’t see many other women doing this here yet,” she says. “But I feel like people are giving me space and a chance.” Support from other women entrepreneurs—restaurant owners and caterers who helped host her pop-ups—has made a difference.
Her advice for aspiring pizza makers is refreshingly simple. “Get a book and do the dough,” Oberlin says. “Nobody’s going to say making pizza is a bad idea. They’ll want to come to your house and eat your pizza.”
The real challenge, she says, is taking action. “When I got well again, I thought that whatever I would do next had to be amazing and great. But I’m realizing now that you just have to enjoy what you’re doing. Things are never exactly as you think they’ll be. There’s a difference between wanting and hoping. If you don’t take action with hope, it’s just a want. You should just do it and hope it will work out.”
And if her ambitions succeed, she hopes the journey will come full circle. “Someday I’d love for people to fly to Eindhoven and ask, ‘What are you doing with pizza?’” Oberlin says, smiling. “The same way I flew to New York to learn.”
Alexandra Mortati is the marketing director for Orlando Foods and founder of Women In Pizza, a not-for-profit organization that empowers women in the pizza industry to share their stories, display their talents, inspire innovations, and connect with one another and the world. The article has been edited from the original version that appeared on the Instagram account for Women In Pizza. Click here to learn more about the organization.
