A View From The Top

How Mici co-founder invented tool to simplify kitchen operations

Jeff Miceli, the co-founder of Mici Italian, explains how they designed a pizza press to simplify the process of creating artisanal pies.

Jeff Miceli, the co-founder of Mici Italian, designed a pizza press to simplify the process of creating artisanal pies.

June 9, 2022

By Jeff Miceli, co-founder of Mici Italian
When my brother and I started Mici Italian, our goal was to ensure the product was always top quality. We immediately discovered how much harder it is to do things the artisanal way rather than using the generic processes of most pizza chains. It's incredibly labor-intensive, and there is much more prep work when you're making all the sauces from scratch and cooking pizza directly on a hot stone.

Perfecting the dough for an artisanal pizza is a finicky process, and training the staff on how to do it was taking a long time. We quickly decided that we needed to make the process easier, and I got to thinking about how to streamline molding the dough without sacrificing its quality.

There were tools out there that we could use, but they would diminish the quality of the finished product. We were fanatical about maintaining the premium quality of our menu items, so I started tinkering around, making different prototypes and contraptions, to see if I could create the perfect press. It was critical that the press didn't crush the cell structure of the dough and left enough room in the middle to pull apart the dough.

The mold I settled on was one with dimples to simulate hand pressing and a slight cone shape to allow the dough to breathe and to create a thicker center. When I brought the press into the store, the kitchen staff didn't want me to take it home because it worked so well and streamlined production.

I have tried every kind of mold, and there is nothing else like it — the way it effortlessly executes the process. It got me thinking about how patenting the technology would be extremely useful for our franchising endeavors; it would be a great selling point to offer owners this press that was easy to use and could produce a perfect pizza. A couple of years later, we received the incredible news that the patent was granted.

The press has sped up kitchen operations and made it easier for the kitchen to make quality hand-pressed pizzas, that are crunchy on the outside and chewy in the middle. As franchisees sign on, they get to see firsthand how efficient the press is. Even business people with no pizza-making experience are impressed.

We bring potential franchise owners into a kitchen at one of the stores and walk them through how to use it, and they can make a pizza right there themselves. They see that it's a very simple process, and then they get to eat the finished product and fully experience how high-quality it is.

Our mission at Mici is to have old-time recipes with modern convenience, and the press allows us to capitalize on both of these values. It has truly been a game-changer, and we're excited to see more stores take advantage of it as Mici Italian expands across the nation.