Americans spend around $38 billion a year on pizza and almost 60 percent of that goes to chain restaurants — around 39 percent goes just to Pizza Hut, Dominos, Little Caesars and Papa John's. And, with all due respect to the hot dog stuffed crust abominations they make in those fine establishments, every New Yorker knows the best pie comes from the pizzeria down the block. And yet, as lucky as we are to live in a mecca of quality pizza, it's still almost impossible to order a good, local pie online.
“We're changing all that," Ilir Sela, founder and CEO of Slice said. "We want to make it super easy to order real pizza.”
Slice is a platform that allows users to order pizza online from local, independent pizzerias. Simply fire up the company's website or app, and with a few clicks the guys down the street will start whipping up your favorite pie.
Like most things good about pizza, Slice has strong ties to New York.
Back in 2010, Sela was working in IT and building websites in Staten Island. When friends and family members needed a website built for their pizzerias, they naturally turned to him. As online ordering became popular, Sela had an idea.
“We thought, let’s figure out how to get all these local shops under one roof and let them compete with Big Pizza,” Sela said.
When Sela is talking about Big Pizza, he's not referring to Koronet's head-sized slices. Chain pizzerias dominate the scene in 33 states. In places like Kansas, just 26 percent of pizzerias are independent.
“After you go outside of an area like Manhattan or downtown San Francisco, your delivery options are largely limited to the chains," Sela said.
Today, Slice makes millions of dollars of pizza sales a month, for over 6,000 independent pizzerias, a small slice of the over 39,000 independent pizzerias that operate in the United States. The company knows all too well that pizza inspires loyalty, and is aggressively adding new places to the platform every day.
“My local pizzeria is like my barber or my mechanic — you just don’t change it every week,” Sela said. “Moving forward, we’re going to build relationships with pizza restaurants around the country.”
Of course, it wasn't always like that, and in the company's infancy, Sela would take each order placed online and call it into the pizzeria himself.
“I even switched my cell phone contract to AT&T so that I could be on my phone while surfing the web at the same time,” Sela said.
Overwhelmed, he began tweeting at Wiley Cerilli, a co-founder at Seamless' for advice on how to scale the business. Cerilli responded, and helped Slice raise a seed round. Today, the entire founding team of Seamless sits on the company's board.
Slice has come a long, long way since those early days, having raised $4.5 million and employing 40 people here in New York, and another 120 in Europe. While the majority of staff may be in Europe, the leadership is all New York, along with the company's marketing, product and engineering teams.
Image via Carlos De La Cantera.
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