Alice Pizza, Italy’s first pizza chain with more than 190 outlets, plans 25 new openings and 200 hires in 2023.
Four years of steady growth and economic sustainability for the Italian company, which in 2022 exceeded 100 million in sales and distributed 6.3 million kg of pizza.
Alice Pizza, the first pizza chain in Italy, is now one of the largest food retail companies with more than 190 outlets throughout the country. The growth target for the year 2023 includes 25 new openings throughout Italy and the hiring of 200 new employees.
This is an important new challenge in line with the growth path started 4 years ago by the company with the entry of the Italian investment fund, IDeA Taste of Italy, which acquired 70 percent of the company.
Alice Pizza’s philosophy is to combine an artisanal production approach with a managerial model that aims to develop in the territory through three well-defined directions: neighborhoods, city centers, and shopping malls. This model of area diversification has enabled Alice Pizza to pursue a stable and real development plan over time and balanced growth between directly operated outlets and franchises, equally distributed between Central and Northern Italy.
“Alice Pizza is a demonstration of how it is possible to become the leading pizza chain in Italy in just a few years by creating more than 190 outlets and training more than 2,000 employees,” comments Claudio Baitelli, CEO of Alice Pizza. Our winning recipe is based on the artisanal creation of a pizza made by professionals with high quality ingredients and a managerial mentality typical of the mindset of the largest international food retail chains that has been able to develop a proper management of the company’s numbers and at the same time fostered a constant economic sustainability. We started from the city of Rome to transform in a short time into a national chain,” Baitelli continues, “with outlets equally distributed between Lazio and the rest of the regions. In northern Italy, in particular, we have about 80 outlets, more than 25 in Milan alone. By 2023 we aim to have new openings all over the country, creating new jobs.”
So for Alice Pizza, 2023 is to be a continuation of 2022, a year that recorded very positive numbers. Last year alone, the company opened 25 new outlets, exceeding 100 million euros in sales and reaching 6.3 million kilograms of pizza distributed in an entire year.
One of this year’s strategic novelties, on the other hand, concerns the approach of Alice Pizza to the world of travel, with the opening of outlets in the places where thousands of potential consumers pass through and travel: on Thursday, April 13, Alice Pizza opens a new store inside Milan’s Garibaldi Station, while in the coming months openings will be planned in one of the most important Italian stations, Rome’s Termini Station, and in one of the most important Italian airports, Malpensa Airport.
“The constant development of our company allows us each year to introduce new employees and offer them not only a valid work opportunity, but above all a chance for personal and professional growth,” says Claudio Baitelli. “To support the development and opening of new stores, we work on several aspects that have allowed us to stimulate people to the maximum: the company climate, training and welfare, and in this sense we have also introduced incentive mechanisms for all roles in the stores. For example, the 200 new people we plan to hire this year will have to fill different roles useful for store management: these are pizza makers, salespeople and store managers. As always, the new employees will be placed on a path of continuing education to offer, to all of them, the possibility, within a few years, to perform professions that are even more central to the company. For many of the new hires, training will mainly come through attending the two Alice Pizza Academies, in Rome and Milan, where they will be able to learn the secrets of the pizza chef’s trade.”
In addition, there is the possibility linked to expansion into the foreign market, where Alice Pizza has only a small presence for now. The strategy of the Italian company, again, is not to place some sort of flag in the various “conquered” places, but as for Italy to saturate the market of a city in a given continent with important results and numbers. For this reason, several foreign channels remain open, which just in the coming months could materialize.
