Victor Barry was always going to serve pizza. And in early 2016—two decades on from a gig at his uncle’s Niagara Falls pizzeria—the Toronto chef opened up Piano Piano, the restaurant, on the Harbord Street site of his former fine-dining establishment Splendido.

Piano Piano, the company, now consists of four locations, with a fifth in the oven in Hamilton, Ont.; a snack-bar offshoot called Piccolo Piano; and a growing consumer packaged goods (CPG) business. More restaurateur than cook these days, Barry started selling frozen pizzas during the pandemic. And earlier this month, Piano Piano bought the chilled-pies business of fellow Toronto eatery General Assembly.

The deal includes a Mississauga production facility and the rights to use the General Assembly brand on frozen pizza, as well as direct-to-consumer (DTC) and monthly subscription sales channels. GA interim CEO Eric Balshin will join Piano Piano to head CPG and corporate development. 

Under the terms of the deal, Piano Piano is assuming $1.76 million in General Assembly’s debt and its lease on the facility; Barry said no cash changed hands, and debt-holders have opted to convert what they’re owed into equity in Piano Piano. 

In his first interview since the deal was announced, the restaurateur talked to The Logic about getting into the frozen pizza business, what the acquisition means and how he plans to expand the Piano Piano brand.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You’ve been running restaurants for quite a while. Why go into the CPG business?

COVID. We got shut down, restaurants. We shifted our focus into selling anything we could sell at that time to survive. And frozen pizza hit home real hard. There were a couple people who did it during COVID—General Assembly, ourselves and Libretto being the three major players that have made a bit of a mark on the frozen pizza industry in Ontario. 

It was always an idea that we wanted to do, just never really had the time or space to start it. We started selling them at Cheese Boutique [in Toronto]. My first delivery, I sent them 30 pizzas —froze them in a chest freezer overnight, vacuum packed them, put them in the back of my car, dropped them off. And by the time I had driven back to Harbord Street to the restaurant, they were all sold. In that moment, I was like, “We have something here.”

The most we could freeze overnight was 30, maybe 50 pizzas. It started from there. And then we slowly started reaching out to different places to see if they wanted to carry it and got a couple of distributors. Now we’re selling about 8,000 to 10,000 pizzas a week. 

Is the frozen pizza business a significant revenue driver right now?

Pre-acquisition, we would have sold about $2.4 million in frozen pizza [this year]. We probably would have sold around $19 million in restaurants. So let’s call it 10-ish per cent of sales. 

I believe that CPG—frozen pizzas and other lines that we plan to start offering over the next 18 months—will change that percentage and balance of power in our company. We plan on CPG being the biggest growth factor for us over the next two years. The truth is, building a restaurant is not an inexpensive endeavour. It costs millions of dollars to open and there is a finite amount of seats and time for which people come and eat at those seats. There is not an infinite amount of doors or stores that we can sell our frozen pizzas to, but it is much larger than the number of seats that I own in restaurants. 

So we should be able to meaningfully grow our business in frozen food products for years to come. Ontario and Canada are just the beginning. 

What is it exactly that you’re buying from General Assembly?

The place where we were producing the pizzas, we’d reached the maximum capacity. It only had a municipal licence. You’re allowed to sell food through retailers, but in order to cross a provincial boundary we needed a [Canadian Food Inspection Agency] licence. With this transaction, we get all the licensing that allows us to ship North America-wide. Not Mexico. 

And it gives us very large capacity, with a little bit of investment to add in some automated processes. We were maxing out at around 2,000 pizzas a day. That was about 18 hours of work throughout the day. At this facility we have the capacity to produce around 5,000 pizzas in an eight-hour shift. We can do 10,000 a day now.

Do you see value in continuing to have the General Assembly line? Is there brand value there?

There definitely is. They worked really, really hard and spent a fair sum of money on building out the awareness and brand. A lot of that went to acquiring new customers in the DTC line, which in a post-COVID world is not necessarily as robust as it was during COVID, and kind of fell flat. 

One thing that I can always say that I’m very good at is product—the food that you put in your mouth, making it delicious. I will definitely put my mark and change up the recipes of the pizza. But with the General Assembly name, their sales and distribution, it would be silly for me to close that down. It’ll be a massive part of the business. We will sell more General Assembly units of pizza than we will sell of Piano Piano. 

The goal is to have a mass-premium product. We’re entering what has always been a race to the bottom in the frozen pizza aisle. It’s, “Who can sell something cheaper and shittier?” Dr. Oetker and Delissio have a place. They’re just not delicious. What we’re trying to offer is all-natural, delicious, good-for-you products that you can feel comfortable serving your family.

So pizza is the first step in a broader CPG play?

We’re working with a co-packer out of Italy in order to start making a little bit of pasta that we can sell underneath the Piano Piano banner, and also making some ourselves. We’ll probably start the pasta in DTC: “Would you like a Piano Piano truffle al forno rigatoni?”

The Caesar salad dressing of Piano Piano is exceptional. We’ll definitely be entering that world within the next little while. There’s a lot of things that you will see coming out in the Piano Piano CPG world over the next 18 to 24 months.

Was this always the plan? You’ve kind of done everything in this world of food.

I’ve been working in restaurants since I was 11—my uncle owned a pizzeria in Niagara Falls. I loved it. And then I did a high school co-op at the Prince of Wales Hotel in Niagara-on-the-Lake. I decided in that moment, “This is what I’m going to do with the rest of my life.” I was good at it. I had a mind-to-hand connection that I could just watch somebody do something and do it the same.

I traveled the world, worked at Michelin-star restaurants. I purchased Splendido when I was 26, and I brought it back up to one of the best restaurants in the country. I was firing on all pistons at that moment. And then my wife got sick, and I had to focus on my family and being more of a business person. 

So we turned into Piano Piano. I’ve always loved pizza. My license plate is PIZAPIE—that’s what my wife gave me on my first birthday while we were together. I’ve spent millions of dollars traveling and eating pizza. It was only natural that eventually I was going to open up a restaurant that focused a lot on pizza. It was going really well.

Then COVID hit. As Warren Buffett says, when everyone else is fearful, it’s the time to be greedy. We did the opposite [of what] most restaurateurs did—we got bigger, not smaller. 

You’ve seen General Assembly’s experience on the public markets. Would you ever take Piano Piano public?

I always use this quote from Star Wars: “Only a Sith believes in absolutes.” The truth is, I don’t have an exact answer to you. 

But I’m not looking to go public. I want to grow a private business that has great value for the shareholders that are part of the company and for myself. That, to me, is very exciting—to step into the role of a business person who develops products that people get to enjoy in their homes and in my restaurants.