The Pizza Oven Startup With a Plan to Own Every Piece of the Pie

Newlyweds make more pizza from scratch than just about anyone else, says Kristian Tapaninaho, who co-founded home-pizza oven company Ooni Ltd. with his wife, Darina Garland. It’s a “weird correlation,” he muses, extracting a gooey, blistered Margherita pie from 950F (510C) heat in the backyard of his family’s 17th century Edinburgh home. “Maybe it’s just beginning that nesting period in your life, when you want to stay home together and not eat out as much.” Internal data from the company bears this out, he says; so does his own experience.

When Tapaninaho and Garland were newly hitched in 2010, they certainly crafted a lot of homemade ’za. Or at least, they tried to, but the young pair couldn’t find a suitably hot home oven. A self-described problem-solver, Tapaninaho figured he could make one. Without any training in design or engineering, he drafted a prototype using 3D-design software and paid a local metal studio £50 (about $77 in 2010 dollars) to build it. To the couple’s surprise, the invention worked, even if the first pie to emerge from it “looked like a sort of grumpy fajita,” Garland recalls. That original oven ultimately served as the prototype for Ooni, whose name would become all but synonymous with backyard pizza-making during the Covid-19 pandemic.