Photo courtesy of Crushed Red
Crushed Red's location at 140 S. Kirkwood Road at Kirkwood Station Plaza.
Crushed Red has been crushing it.
Since its inception in 2012, the St. Louis-based pizza-and-chopped salad concept has opened six units and signed franchise agreements for two dozen more—no easy feat considering the popularity of the burgeoning fast-casual pizza segment. (Five national fast-casual pizza chains have opened in metro St. Louis since Crushed Red opened its first store in Clayton a little over four years ago.)
With today’s announcement of an equity partnership with Dave Peacock, former Anheuser-Busch president, and Dean VandeKamp, former Ernst & Young partner, Crushed Red is now poised for major growth. Besides their other business interests, Peacock and VandeKamp are active in the food and beverage industry. Their holding company, Vitaligent, currently owns 77 Jamba Juice locations on the West Coast.
Crushed Red co-founder and CEO Chris LaRocca says the partnership will allow the company to grow at a more robust pace. Because of Peacock and Vandekamp’s financial resources and experience in growing a brand, LaRocca says, Crushed Red can now take better advantage of opportunities in the marketplace.
In a release, Crushed Red co-founder Powell Kalish said the partners “understand our culture…and share our passion for building our salad and pizza concept into a national brand.” Under the new partnership, Kalish will become chief development officer, responsible for both real-estate development and overseeing franchisee operations.
Photo by Kevin A. Roberts
Crushed Red is not the original chopped-salad-and-pizza concept, but it does some things differently:
- Salads are chopped on a block (using a twin-bladed curved knife, called a mezzaluna), then organically dressed and plated as customers pass through the line.
- Single-serve pizzas are delivered almost as quickly, after a 90-second bake in a gas-fired, high-temperature oven. (When LaRocca feared the ovens he'd purchased wouldn’t hold up to high volume, he commissioned to have a more durable model built exclusively for Crushed Red.)
- Crushed Red operates under what LaRocca calls an "organic halo," meaning it uses as many organic products as possible, including salad dressings, pizza sauce, and pizza cheese.
- And it's the only restaurant chain (that LaRocca knows of) that uses the Clean Hands system, a device that monitors the frequency of employee hand washing (and notifies the offender's work station when it's not often enough).
LaRocca points out that although Crushed Red's products will remain the same, its marketing focus will change, hence the new tagline (at right). "The fast casual pizza segment is so crowded right now, plus our salad sales outpace pizza sales two to one, so going forward we'd like to be thought of as a salad concept first.
“We now have the horsepower to expand locally, regionally, and nationally, like we wanted to do from the get-go," LaRocca says of the partnership. “We can now grow in a widening circle around St. Louis, seeding new markets with company stores, then look to franchise partners to strengthen that position.”
LaRocca feels that such a collaboration will allow Crushed Red to realize its original mission of becoming "the leading chopped salad and pizza concept in the fast-casual industry."
The next metro area Crushed Red is slated to open at 1684 Clarkson in Chesterfield, the former Krieger's Sports Bar & Grill, in mid-March.
