According to TheDailyBeast.com, “In the summer of 2006, the Uptown section of New Orleans got a new pizza joint. A 500 square foot hole in the wall that had been six feet deep in water less than a year earlier. It wasn’t much to look at and its owners had stuck with possibly the least appealing name to anyone who was out for a quick neighborhood slice. The place was called World’s Healthiest Pizza.”

“For Jeff Leach, the man behind it, the restaurant was an experiment. It was the research lab, in a city now full of them, where he set out to make a pizza out of all-natural ingredients — without processed flours, synthetic cheeses, or chemically preserved toppings, and still packed with probiotics and whole grains. The challenge, as most health nuts understand, was making something that did not taste like warmed up cardboard with cheese. “The first few pizzas we made, you couldn’t even eat them,” says Leach, an archaeologist by training. “They were that bad.’”

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“But through trial and error, Leach and his co-founder Randy Crochet, a real estate investor, improved the product. Customers dropped in to taste the latest prototypes and World’s Healthiest Pizza became a local success, despite a name that rang vaguely of late-night infomercials. “We were a bit of a curiosity,” Leach says. It was around that time that a New Orleans branding specialist named Robbie Vitrano caught wind of it. Within months, he joined Crochet and Leach’s business and immediately changed the name to Naked Pizza. Since then, the three men have turned Naked Pizza into a revolutionary model, an “advocacy brand,” in the fight to promote healthier eating.”