We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jake Wright. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jake below.

Hi Jake, thanks for joining us today. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

The beginning of the idea for my business started in 2008 when I was 20 years old working on a small homestead farm in northern Germany. I was learning German and eager to learn as many new skills as I could. The sustainable, self-sufficient lifestyle on the farm was exciting and new to me. I soaked in as much as I could. On the farm I learned to bake rye sourdough bread in an old brick oven in a bake house that was over 120 years old. I also learned to make flammkuchen, an Alsatian food similar to pizza. I was immediately fascinated with baking in a brick oven. When I left the farm I had the dream of someday building a wood-fired oven. I didn’t yet have the idea for the mobile, wood-fired pizza business, though.

A year later I was back in Germany studying for a year in Würzburg. I visited the farm as often as I could. Throughout the year, at Christmas markets and other festivals, I saw vendors with wood-fired ovens selling flammkuchen. This is when I got the idea to start my business. I finally had a way that made sense for me to build an oven. I had neither the space to build an oven fixed to a permanent location nor the funds to build an oven just for fun. But if I built the oven on a trailer and sold pizza and flammkuchen at festivals I thought I would be able to make it work. I had never seen a wood-fired oven on wheels back home, and thought it would go over great at festivals in the states.

I was finishing up my year in Würzburg and getting antsy to get back to Texas to start the project. I bought all sorts of books on building brick ovens and researched oven designs and materials every chance I had. I spent many hours late at night ignoring university work that needed to be done pouring my time into this idea.

When I got back to Texas in July of 2011 I hit the ground running. I had a year left to finish my degree at the University of Texas in Austin. I had very little money and needed a job. My plan was to finish the project as quickly as possible and start making money every weekend. I scheduled all my classes Tuesdays and Thursdays, so I had 4 days each week to head out to the Hill Country to my parents place on the Llano River to work on the oven. I bought a trailer, settled on an oven design, bought materials and got started. As I was working on the project I was also starting to book events. By November I was ready and also out of money. I went to my hometown bank for a loan to buy the last bit of supplies, tools and food for the first festival. I had an oven and a good idea, I thought, but no money. I was lucky and they loaned me the $4,000 I asked for.

My dad told me he’d be free labor for the first few events. So in November, we headed out on a 6 hour drive to Alpine, Texas for my first event. We had very little idea what we were doing but it turned out well! We had a long line both days and learned a lot.

Jake, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

We are OH MY PIZZA PIE–a team of mobile wood-fired pizza bakers who have been traveling around Texas since 2011 baking brick oven pizzas at festivals, events and parties. Our home base is now our new shipping container pizza shop at Real Ale Brewing Co. in Blanco, Texas!

For the first ten years or so, we exclusively set up at festivals. We were very busy with our one rig for the Spring and Fall festival seasons but shut down completely for the months in between. We were straight up road dogs. We still are, but we have also branched out and do many different types of events now. We cater private and corporate events and set up on weeknights at residential communities around Central Texas.

Our set ups are all homemade and have a rustic style. We’ve re-used old tin roofing, an old horse trailers, a few old army trailers and old steel tank heads. If we show up in a new rig somewhere, people recognize us by out signature Sharpie on plywood menus! All our rigs are different by we try to maintain the rustic style across each set up.

We currently have a shipping container pizza rig at Real Ale Brewing Co. in Blanco, Tx, a corrugated tin festival trailer, a horse trailer catering rig and a new Sprinter Van converted into a pizza rig. A few years ago I was living in Germany again and built out an old Swiss fire truck into a pizza rig to use at festivals in Germany in the summer. If everything falls into place this summer, that rig will be joining the fleet in Texas in 2025!

We’d love to hear the story of how you turned a side-hustle into a something much bigger.

When I started the business I was still a student and I needed very little income. It felt like a side-hustle, school during the week and working festivals every weekend. After my final year in college I jumped full time into the pizza business, but not much changed with my work schedule. I just had more time. I travelled in the off season and worked the festival seasons, finding friends or friends of friends to work with me as needed.

As the years passed, I got married, had kids, and bought a house. I increasingly needed more income. The two festival seasons with one rig wasn’t cutting it anymore. I also had a great crew that was ready to run a rig by themselves. Around 2021 I built a second rig so we could double up on weekends when the opportunities were there. A few years after that I decided we needed to start branching out into different types of events. The 2 rig set up was a milestone, as it allowed us to capitalize on the busy festival months by setting up at 2 great events on a single weekend. We missed so many opportunities before we had the second trailer. Another milestone came in 2024. I built a new oven and converted a shipping container for our first permanent location at Real Ale Brewing Co. in Blanco, Texas. A few months later, in May of 2025, we added a Sprinter van rig to the mobile fleet, another really important addition.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

At the end of 2016, with a 4 month old baby, my wife and I decided to move to Germany, her home country, in roughly a year. We had no plans for how long we would be there. This was going to be a huge pivot in both life and work. I was not ready at first, and had no idea how I was going to make it work. I figured I would shut my business down and start something new in Germany. In the summer of 2017, the crew I had been working with for a while, guys a few years younger who grew up in the same town as me, expressed interest in running the festivals after I left.

Over the next few months everything fell into place. In January of 2018 we moved to the homestead farm where I first started my wood-fired oven adventure almost a decade earlier. We lived there with no rent, I worked on the farm and in the garden, helping grow most of our own food. The pizza crew in the states ran the festivals and I returned twice a year for 3 weeks to work the best festivals we had. In 2019 I decided to build a pizza rig in Germany and start that same type of business there. After a year and a half we came back to Texas. The German pizza truck was finished and planned to be a summer rig for Germany, but these plans were delayed for several years during Covid. I finally did one festival in Germany in 2022. Our time in Germany was getting shorter each summer, so I started making plans to ship the truck to Texas.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.ohmypizzapie.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ohmypizzapietx/?hl=en