Member News

June 08, 2013

Patxi’s Pizza has found a recipe to quintuple its business in three years.

The fast-growing Bay Area pizza pie maker — which serves four varieties, from ultra thin crust to a hefty Chicago-style deep dish — has been on a massive growth spurt lately, with four new stores opening in the past six months and a couple dozen more in the works.

The burgeoning chain is now raking in $26 million in annual sales — up from $5.2 million in 2010 — with a total of 11 locations, including nine in the Bay Area and two in Colorado.

According to owner Bill Freeman, a serial entrepreneur who started the company as a fun hobby with partner and pizza maker Francisco “Patxi” Azpiroz in 2004, the company is on the brink of an even bigger expansion.

“It’s not that we’re all of a sudden growing quickly, it’s that we’ve been planning this and now we’re capable and ready to expand at a higher velocity,” Freeman said.

Within the next couple of years, Freeman plans to open up to four more restaurants in the Bay Area and another one in Colorado, while at the same time eyeing several markets across the West Coast in which to expand.

Freeman said the company is pursuing locations in Dallas, Houston, Portland, Seattle, Los Angeles and San Diego, with a five-year goal of opening 35 company-owned shops.

The company already has nearly 600 employees. If it hits its goal of 46 locations, it will employ more than 2,500 new workers.

Freeman said all of the pizza chain’s locations are doing well, with the Livermore and San Jose restaurants its top performers. Sales at Patxi’s restaurant in San Francisco’s Marina district alone are topping $1,000 per square foot a year.

Freeman said that the quality and variety of Patxi’s pizzas are the key factors that have made the chain so successful.

“We do gluten-free, vegan and all-natural,” Freeman said. “Our customers can tell that it’s of a higher quality.”

The company also has baked a big charitable component into its business model to support local nonprofits that work in education — something that has helped it gain the approval and support of the communities it’s in. This year alone, it will donate nearly $200,000 to local charities.

“They’re such great corporate citizens, which makes them wonderful tenants for the neighborhood,” said Todd David, president of Residents for Noe Valley Town Square, a group working to create a small public park, to which Patxi’s recently donated $25,000.

However, earlier this year the company got slammed by San Francisco officials for not extending that charity to its employees as part of the Healthy SF initiative.

After collecting surcharges that weren’t given out to employees for health care, Patxi’s agreed to spend $320,000 to settle a complaint from San Francisco officials that it didn’t follow the city’s controversial health care law. Freeman said the discrepancy was merely a reporting error and chalked up the whole crackdown to politics.

Either way, the incident hasn’t affected business at all, Freeman said. “Sales have been up double digits for the past four years and are on track to continue this year,” he said.