When the moon hit their eye …
Dessert pizza fed their romance; now they offer it to world
Childhood sweethearts Dorene and Alex Goff ate chocolate chip pizza together at Pizza Inn after school during their junior high years. Now their own version of the confection is set to arrive in Walmart stores in October — and they just learned it will be in Sam’s Clubs in January.
After the couple started dating in 2007, Dorene started looking for a way to make Alex’s favorite treat for him. By the following Valentine’s Day, she’d hit on a winning recipe.
When Alex proposed to Dorene in 2013, he said, it wasn’t with the traditional diamond ring but with a chocolate chip pizza.
Fast-forward to 2019, and the couple was sitting around the house with family one night and everyone wanted chocolate chip pizza. But no one felt like making it, and Dorene couldn’t find a place to buy it. The next day, she and Alex continued their search for their favorite dessert, but again were disappointed.
By then, Dorene’s version was a family favorite that even had a family name — Serio’s. And that’s when she and Alex had their ah-ha moment and realized there was a commercial niche for it.
When the couple, originally from Conway, moved to Northwest Arkansas in 2009, Dorene’s first job in the area was at Sam’s Club, while Alex worked in the vendor community. So with those connections — and after getting their pizza into some supermarkets, mostly in the Midwest — they took a giant leap and pitched their product, now called Serio’s Dessert Pizza, to Walmart Inc.
Their first meeting with a Walmart buyer in December 2019 didn’t go very well.
“We were shredded,” Alex said.
Still making the pizza in their kitchen at their home in Cave Springs, they went into the meeting woefully unprepared, he said, with basically just a flyer.
But “we had a lot of heart in it,” Alex said.
The couple describe themselves as very optimistic people, but Alex said Dorene was “pretty down in the dumps about it.”
“I felt like we pretty much got crunched,” Dorene said.
One of the things their buyer asked them to do was to create some buzz about their product.
Their first win locally was getting into Bariola’s restaurant in Rogers.
To produce their chocolate chip pizza on a larger scale, though, “we bounced around with about five or six pizza manufacturers in Chicago,” Alex said.
“Then covid happened,” he said. The covid-19 pandemic slowed production at many plants around the country.
Again, discouragement set in.
Alex said that, being a young couple from Northwest Arkansas, “we felt like we weren’t big enough to matter.”
Dorene added, “We felt like, with every person we talked to, we kept getting passed along.”
They pitched Walmart again at the end of 2020. “We got a full no,” Alex said, “but the interview went better. The feedback that time was that the price of our product was too high.” “When you work with Walmart, it’s about what you can give them and at what price,” Dorene said. “The main thing they were concerned about was price.”
Alex said that as he and Dorene have refined the process of manufacturing their pizza over the years, they’ve been able to bring the price down. Still there were minor issues, such as whether the pizzas should be shrinkwrapped before or after the product was frozen.
“Perfecting it was a lot,” Dorene said.
But their third time pitching to Walmart, in October 2021, was the charm, they said.
“I think we almost cried on the phone,” Dorene said. “We felt like [the buyer] was rooting for us.”
But once again, fate intervened.
“We were supposed to launch in October,” Alex said. “In August, our manufacturer called and said they’d had a massive fire at the plant.”
“So we had to make a phone call to the buyer and tell her we weren’t going to be ready to go into stores on time,” he said.
“That was terrible,” Dorene said.
After that, Alex said, their Walmart buyer was changed.
“She’s gone on to a whole new category and we had to build a relationship with a new buyer and start all over,” Alex said.
They quickly got back on track, though.
And now, they expect Serio’s Dessert Pizza — in chocolate chip and a new cinnamon sugar flavor — to be in the frozen-foods sections of 500 Walmart stores, including 150 stores in Arkansas, in early October.
The Goffs’ experience with Walmart is typical for most new suppliers.
Carol Spieckerman, a retail consultant and president of Spieckerman Retail, said she tells her clients that “selling to any retailer, but especially the big guys, is a process, not a pitch. Potential suppliers should approach their business development accordingly.”
Spieckerman advises clients that “taking a phased approach rather than expecting a home run in a first meeting is a good starting point.”
Retailer headquarters are a “revolving door,” she said, “and these days, no two organizations have the same structure and titles.”
“On top of that, decisionmakers and influencers increasingly come from nonretail backgrounds,” Spieckerman said.
These and other dynamics present both challenges and opportunities, she said.
“Suppliers must balance a willingness to fail fast with patience and persistence when opportunities arrive,” Spieckerman said. “‘No’ often means ‘no for now,’ particularly as that revolving door keeps spinning.”
Looking ahead, the Goffs are in talks with more local restaurants about carrying their pizza.
“Northwest Arkansas is such a cool community to live in,” Dorene said. “They rally around people who are trying to do new things and give us a lot of support.”