NXT LVL PZA create deliciously meaty pizzas for everyone to enjoy while secretly removing animals from the supply chain. Our flavour-driven food appeals to meat-eaters as well as vegans; no one has to compromise on taste with us.
We designed our operational concept to fit into a variety of food service operations. Our plan is to collaborate with thousands of food service partners (“host kitchens”) across the globe. The host kitchens cook and deliver the food, and we focus on the upstream supply chain as well as marketing activities.
Wherever and whenever you crave NXT LVL PZA – you will always get it hot and fresh just around the corner. To guarantee the highest quality ingredients whilst simultaneously keeping costs down, we engage in brand collaborations with alternative protein innovation leaders. We offer them straightforward and branding-focused market access – a much smarter approach to new product introductions.
This strategy has been highly successful for us. We’ve already partnered with 16 brands, such as THIS, Beyond Meat, Meatless Farm, Planted, Violife, Heura, Fable, Pleese and Good Catch.
How did you come up with the idea for the company?
I’ve been in the plant-based start-up scene for the last 7 years, so I am well placed to know a vast array of brands that are developing or have already launched exciting new products. However, the “big fast food” market adopts these innovations too slowly. In other words, the McDonald’s and Domino’s of the world could and should already offer much better vegan options. My thought process is that they slow play because they want to keep their core customers eating the stuff that gives them the highest margins, which is currently still factory farmed animal ingredients. To make change happen a lot faster I came up with the NXT LVL concept which hopefully can help catapult vegan fast food out of this unnecessary position.
We have initially focused on pizza because it is the ideal “platform” (quite literally) for brand collaborations, it’s super popular in delivery orders (the UK’s pizza delivery market is currently valued at £2.1bn) and we have found a way to make it operationally suitable for 80% of food service operators (not only pizzerias).
How has the company evolved during the pandemic?
We launched in 2021, so the pandemic hasn’t really had an impact on us too much as a business. For the first few months we worked “in silence”, developing our concept.
Other than that, our concept is “lockdown safe” due to it being a 100% delivery and takeaway business. We work with third party operators who earn incremental revenue with us – helping them through the next potential crisis. Anyway, we hope that we won’t have to deal with lockdowns anymore.
What can we hope to see from NXT LVL PZA in the future?
We’ve just closed our incredible Soho pop-up shop and have now moved our dark kitchen location to Hackney Wick. We are also on Uber Eats, Deliveroo and Just Eat for East Londoners. This month we are onboarding our first host kitchen partners too – it is a big month for us!
Over the next few months, our focus is to nail down operational details in the supply chain. With our first host kitchen partners our aim is to create further awareness of the world’s first “secretly vegan” fast food concept. Then, we’ll be ready to scale up with a plan to make NXT LVL PZA available in 5,000 food service locations across Europe by the end of 2026.
To help with the brand awareness part to our strategy we’re also launching a crowdfunding campaign on Crowdcube this month, find out more here: www.nxtlvlpza.com.
