Frozen · Fresh · Pizza · Foodservice
East Pizzas
Edinburgh sourdough specialists. Seventy-two hour proved dough made from UK-milled flour, Scottish water and salt. Their own line is better than anything I could write: we just make great pizza.
Where it stands
Company detail from Companies House SC572337. Retail launch reported by Scottish Grocer, 26 November 2025.
The product
A pizzeria that became a dough business.
Roly Simpson and Rob Marshall met at Edinburgh New Town Cookery School, left the corporate world, and set out to learn sourdough properly. What began as a pizzeria turned into something else entirely during the pandemic, when everyone started making pizza at home and discovered that the hard part is the dough.
So they sold the dough. Seventy-two hour proved balls, pre-stretched twelve inch bases, and pre-topped pizzas. UK-milled flour, Scottish water, salt. Nothing else in the ingredient deck, which is unusual enough in frozen to be a selling point on its own.
The retail range landed in November 2025: topped Margherita, Pepperoni, Spicy and Ham & Pineapple, plus the dough ball and the bare base for people who want to do the topping themselves.
Underneath that sits a wholesale business built for kitchens. Portion-controlled pre-baked bases that go from freezer to plate in five to seven minutes, and low minimum orders so a single pub can trial without committing to a pallet.
Buying for a frozen fixture or a wholesale list? The trade pack is ready to send.
Book 20 minutesWhy a buyer stocks it
Sourdough is the premium cue that frozen pizza never had.
A three word ingredient list
Flour, water, salt. In a fixture where the back of pack usually runs to a paragraph, that is the whole pitch and it needs no explaining on shelf.
Three price points, one brand
A dough ball, a base and a topped pizza. A buyer can enter at entry price and trade a shopper up without adding a second supplier.
Already proven at independents
Farm shops, delis and artisan grocers across Scotland and England took it first. That is the right order. The risk has been taken elsewhere.
Audited, and used to being audited
SALSA approval plus nine years of supply means the technical pack is not a project. It is a document they already have.
The base is promotable when the aisle is not
Pizza is one of the thirteen restricted categories. Plain pizza bases are excluded from all of it. A base can be multibuy promoted, sited at the front of store and advertised before nine o'clock when every topped pizza around it legally cannot.
The objection
The premium slot is crowded, and cheese and pepperoni are ninety per cent of the fixture.
Both true, and together they close off the obvious pitch. So it is worth putting them first.
Premium frozen pizza is the only growing part of the category, up twenty-four per cent on value and twenty per cent on units. But it is five per cent of the whole, and the five to six pound slot already holds stone-baked, triple-fermented, imported and sourdough entries. Meanwhile cheese and pepperoni take almost ninety per cent of all frozen pizza sales, so a topped sourdough pizza is fighting for the remaining tenth against brands with media budgets.
So the argument is not the pizza. It is the base.
Retail pizza bases are barely a tier at all. A premium Italian brand only launched its first one in April 2026, and the established dough brand sits below it. Two entries, against a claim that four separate data houses agree is travelling: sourdough volume up more than fifty per cent, in-store bakery sourdough up forty-nine per cent, household penetration at 20.3 per cent, and speciality bread at £190m and up twelve per cent in a year when conventional packaged bread lost £64.4m.
Then there is the mechanic that makes a base worth more than a pizza to a category manager. Since October 2025 pizza cannot carry a volume price promotion or sit in a store's high traffic locations, and since January 2026 it cannot be advertised before nine o'clock. Plain pizza bases are excluded from all three. That is not a marketing advantage. It is a structural one, and it does not expire.
A cost argument sits alongside it. Mozzarella is up year on year while cheddar has fallen, and forecasters expect mozzarella to keep rising. A dough business does not carry that line at all.
And in foodservice the arithmetic does the selling on its own. Pub pizza runs a one to three pound food cost against a twelve to eighteen pound menu price. One brewery went from introducing pizza to a million pounds of turnover against a £750,000 forecast. An Edinburgh operator takes more than a fifth of food sales from it. What stops most of them is consistency, which is precisely what a seventy-two hour proved bought-in base sells.
Category and premium tier data: Circana, 52 weeks to 14 June 2025. Sourdough: Circana, 52 weeks to 2 August 2025; NIQ to July 2025; Kantar, 52 weeks to 15 June 2025; NIQ and The Grocer Top Products Survey 2025. Promotion, placement and advertising scope per Defra and DHSC implementation guidance. Dairy prices per Global Dairy Trade, July 2026. Pub economics reported by The Morning Advertiser, 17 April 2026.
In the fixture
Three price points, and one of them is nearly empty.
Frozen pizza has five crowded tiers. Retail bases have two entries. This range spans both, which is unusual and commercially useful.
Entering on the base and trading a shopper up to the topped pizza is one supplier doing two jobs. It also makes the entry SKU the promotable one, which is the opposite of how this fixture normally works.
Tiers observed across a major UK multiple's frozen pizza fixture, August 2026. Tiers shown, brands not named. Range concentration per Circana.
What I did
Scaling the retail channel
The November range works at independents. The job now is regional multiples, wholesalers and symbol groups, which is a different conversation with different maths.
Wholesale beyond Scotland
Foodservice distribution into England, where the brand is unknown and the product does the arguing.
Range architecture
Three channels that currently overlap: direct, wholesale and retail. Deciding what belongs where, so they stop competing with each other.
Buyer-ready materials
Trade pricing structure and a pitch that survives a category manager reading it twice.
Next step
Want the range, the terms and the technical pack?
I run the commercial conversation for East Pizzas. Trade price list, margin structure, portion costs, shelf life and the SALSA technical pack are ready to send. Twenty minutes is usually enough for you to know whether this fits your fixture or your wholesale list, and I will tell you if I think it does not.
Founder rather than a buyer? This is how I work, and these are the other brands.