Upfront, King David (KD) Pizza seems to be just an ordinary frozen pizza company––but the frozen products have decades of experience behind it.
Eden Hazan, known on social media as ‘pizzaboyinthe6ix’, is the son of Uri––a father who moved his family from Israel to Canada in 1994––opening the very first King David Pizzeria in West Edmonton Mall. Before the new millennium, the family once again packed their belongings and moved to Toronto, with the goal of bringing their pizza with them.
Hazan grew up in and around his dad’s pizza shop, and even when he left for school at the University of Western Ontario, his family’s business never left his mind.
“My parents sent me up the dough, the cheese, the sauce and all the ingredients,” Hazan says. “Magically, the pizzas that I made in my apartment ended up tasting almost the exact same as the pizzas my dad made at the shop.”
Following his graduation, Hazan identified a large gap in the market for quality frozen pizzas that were kosher. Knowing that KD Pizza has always been a kosher business, he immediately began planning out how they could transform the business and start selling frozen products.
“I knew that in order to really take that product that everyone has known and loved and infuse it into a frozen pizza, I needed to go a little further and invest in the right pieces of equipment,” he says.
For starters, KD uses a specialized pizza stone conveyor-belt oven, a piece of equipment Hazan says is uncommon with most frozen pizza producers. The stones allow the pizza crust to have that perfect crunchy and chewy texture.
Like many businesses, KD had to quickly find a new way of operating amidst a global pandemic that saw a massive hit on the food industry. For them, the pandemic had shot down a lot of their hard-earned growth.
“The quarter prior to COVID was our first profitable quarter. It was a very exciting time,” says Hazan. “Then COVID hit and deflated us right back down.”
Apart from frozen pizza products, which make up a large portion of the business, KD also has a number of food service clients that are supplied with frozen dough balls and other products from the pizza company. Many of those clients were lost when the pandemic hit.
To adapt, the pizza company began selling their frozen products straight to the consumer through either contactless delivery or curb-side pickup from their Toronto factory. Additionally, they created their own Pizza Club––a subscription service that sends a number of frozen pizzas to your doorstep every month.
Hazan says that their subscription service has been successful, and has fostered a loyal and kind culture of pizza lovers.
“Sometimes, one month you’ll eat more pizza than the next, and a lot of people have been gifting an order to a relative or a friend,” says Hazan. “Kind of like paying it forward, with pizza.”
He says that this is a campaign they would love to play with in the future, but are focused on getting people to stop relying on generic, grocery store brands of frozen pizza. One way Hazan is offering this is through a ‘free pizza for life’ contest, where one person can win a pizza subscription for life.
KD is set to go through another monumental change to their operations, with new initiatives and offerings at the forefront. At the root of the company though, is Hazan’s family, who have seen their family business transform throughout the past two decades.
To this day, KD is completely a family run business. Hazan takes care of all the front-of-house operations while his father is still slinging pies and teaching the new generation of workers how it’s done.
“My dad thinks I just sit there and do nothing because he’s such an old school guy,” says Hazan. “He’s slowly learning. We work together. We’re a team.”
