Meet Hunter Norris | 10 Year Old Pizza Entrepreneur

We had the good fortune of connecting with Hunter Norris and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Hunter, can you walk us through the thought-process of starting your business?
My dad has his own business and that made me curious about what it would be like to have my own business. So, I asked him if I could start my own business and we spent a month coming up with different ideas. We both love pizza and we have a pizza oven from New York City that my dad shipped out here so we could enjoy great pizza anytime we wanted. So we already had the oven and knowledge to start my own pizza business!

Alright, so let’s move onto what keeps you busy professionally?
I started my business when I was 7 years old. We started in our kitchen learning how to make dough and stretch it to make pizzas. After learning how to make pizzas we set up a website to take orders and made 10 pizzas per week on Thursday nights. Friends and neighbors would order and then pick up their pizzas in our backyard. We experimented with different kinds of pizzas and did this for 1 year. We used our profits to purchase a commercial mixer so we could scale our production.

We needed to find a way to make a product that we could sell to many, many people. We experimented with a pizza bread-like product (think of a calzone meets a stromboli). We first sold them at a kid entrepreneur fair in Torrance. Then we tested selling them in a cafe and even got them into a grocery store along side other frozen pizzas! It was really exciting, but then we started calculating the costs to produce this product and realized it took too much time to make and it wasn’t profitable. So, we had to pivot. We then tried pizza bites, but again, they were too labor intensive.

After all of this experimentation we decided to look at industry research to understand if there were any customers that wanted a new pizza product. We then started testing new products in this area.

Today, we’re excited to be in active conversations and testings with a few local entrepreneurs who run great businesses. They’ve been incredibly supportive.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
My favorite places are Top Golf, Disneyland, and Six Flags. My favorite restaurant is Jame in El Segundo.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
It goes without saying that my co-founder (my dad) has spent a lot of time with me to help me get my business off the ground and running. I’ve learned so much since our early days of selling pizza out of our backyard and am excited to learn more as we grow our business. My mom has also helped me understand our target customers and conduct research to learn more about their interests and expectations. We’ve used this research to create new products that we know people will love.

I’d also like to give a shoutout to all of our early customers, friends, and family who supported us early on and continue to be big fans. I’ve also gotten to meet some great entrepreneurs who have offered their advice, guidance and even allowed us to test our product with their customers, which has been incredibly valuable and educational.

Lastly, I’d also like to thank the team at King’s Hawaiian who spent time with me to help me think about how to scale my business by allowing me to tour their factory and facilities, which inspired me to think of how to operate my own business efficiently.

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pizzahunter.co/

Image Credits
Kevin Norris