A deal between two Toronto eateries has closed a chapter in the story of one of the more unusual Canadian tech ventures born of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The order: Piano Piano has taken over the frozen-pizza business of General Assembly (TSX-V: GA), in exchange for picking up $1.76 million of General Assembly’s debt. In the box are a Mississauga production facility and all its equipment, and the right to use the GA name on packaged pies forever.

The recipe: Lifted by a signature sourdough starter, Ali Khan Lalani opened General Assembly’s Adelaide Street West doors to diners in December 2017. After COVID-19 restrictions closed them again in March 2020, General Assembly got into the consumer packaged goods business. 

That September, the eatery unboxed what it called the “world’s first pizza subscription service,” offering to send customers in the Toronto area between four and 10 vacuum-packed pies per month. By the end of the year, it had brought in $181,560 in revenue, securities filings show, while wholesale via grocers had added $280,677. 

The following February, the company closed a $13-million Series A. “The funding is financing our transition into a food tech company,” Lalani told Toronto Life. Not two weeks later, General Assembly filed a non-offering prospectus to list on the TSX Venture Exchange; the document depicted 15 flavours of pies. On June 3, 2021, the stock began trading at an opening price of $1.18.

That year, General Assembly shipped 458,772 frozen pies, bringing in nearly $3.99 million—86 per cent of total revenue. Pizza-as-a-service had arrived.

The dough deflates: With the pandemic receding, at-home pizza reheaters once again became in-restaurant eaters. In the first nine months of 2022, General Assembly’s frozen business sold $1.82 million worth of pies, down 42 per cent year over year due to a drop in direct-to-consumer deliveries. 

So General Assembly sold, “alleviating the ongoing requirement to fund the growth” of a frozen-pizza business “operating in a significant cash burn position” that would otherwise have stayed “in an unsustainable investment mode” this year, the firm’s management wrote in an investor release last Friday. It cited “the increasingly challenging funding environment for micro-cap public companies.” The stock closed at $0.025 that day. The company did not respond to The Logic’s request for an interview.

What’s next: The deal gives Piano Piano a site to ramp up its production of its own frozen pizzas, which were also a product of the pandemic, said restaurateur Victor Barry. But he’ll keep running General Assembly’s pizza-subscription and frozen-pizza delivery options, and the General Assembly brand. “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,” Barry said, although subscribers soon might find they taste a little different. “I will definitely put my mark and change up the recipes of the pizza.” 

Meanwhile, a half-hour stroll south, General Assembly’s Adelaide kitchen is humming at pre-pandemic pitch. Its food-tech dreams abandoned, in the coming months it plans to scout locations for more restaurants. For now, however, it’s a single Toronto pizzeria with a stock ticker.