Our Story

At pizza presto we are nuts about our dough, which creates the base our customers have come to know and love. Our head chef and owner, Mitchell Ross (also referred to as the ‘Dough Nut’) is in the kitchen from as early as five in the morning, rolling out his special dough recipe which only comprises four simple ingredients — flour, yeast, salt and olive oil. Mitch’s dough is a source of pride and boasts a thick base and crust while managing to remain airy, fluffy and light.

Mitch learned his trade with his Dad being trained in Italian kitchens and to this day, pizza presto is largely a family run operation. With the pandemic events over the last several years, it hasn’t been easy for the restaurant to continue. Mitch and the family rode out the storm and have now also diversified into ready-made pizza’s.

As the story goes, one week into New Zealand's first lockdown with no income and the future of Auckland Central Hospitality looking grim, it was time to go back to the drawing board.

With an extensive knowledge in making Dough and Pizza, it seemed logical to continue along those lines of business. After quite a few phone calls with friends and work colleagues, analysis of the frozen pizza range available to us all whilst in lockdown, led us to realise there was no Restaurant quality frozen pizza on the market.  

We then reached out to equipment suppliers to source what was available on the market and formed a partnership to ensure we had enough skills to produce, market and distribute. 

This is when the testing began. This itself was a task because once we thought we had a product worthy, we had to run product tests with a limited budget available, so we built a mobile pizza shop with a full commercial kitchen. We parked it at the back of two Ponsonby bars and started selling both fresh and frozen until customers couldn't tell the difference. We made sure that the ready made pizza was easily cooked in multiple ovens, both domestic and commercial. We installed domestic ovens into our mobile shop including bench top ovens that ranged from $70 to $500 to make sure they could produce the same product. Commercial oven test cooking was easy as Auckland have great suppliers and they all helped us to check our Pizzas with their machines. 

One year on to the date and we actually had a product we were happy with so we started to investigate markets to enter. So far we have had nearly 100% success in being accepted and continue to work tirelessly to improve our packaging, brand and add products to the ready made menu.

Buy a box of 4 pizza's to put in the freezer and cook whenever you want to get a pizza that makes you believe you are in our restaurant getting it fresh from the kitchen.

Individual frozen pizzas available for instore pickup from 8 Commerce Street, Auckland CBD. 

All online order deliveries will be dispatched within 3 working days.