Rachael Willoughby and Elliott Richmond, the founders of the uber-local pizza company CasaGee’s, have welcomed five new members to their weekend team.
The couple from Cleeve, near Cheltenham, have taken on four delivery drivers and a new chef as their bespoke pizza business expands yet again.
CasaGee’s was set up almost four years ago as a side hustle by the Cotswold couple as a way of generating income during the pandemic. Elliott was already known to his family and friends as a wonderful chef when it came to making traditional Neapolitan pizzas. He could never bear to buy a pizza, knowing his homemade ones were simply better.
Elliot has always made his own pizzas, including dough – after being brought up in Malta and loving the traditional Neapolitan pizzas (no pineapple allowed!). The couple started out by making 20 pizzas on Friday and Saturday nights during lockdown and delivering them locally (20 pizzas per evening).
Residents booked their orders online during the week in advance. So popular has the service become that they are now delivering 135 pizzas over two nights in their community with the ability to increase that amount over the coming months.
“We cannot believe that we are still growing our little local pizza business and have been able to recruit two people for a Friday night and two for a Saturday night to help with our deliveries. We’re also training a pizza chef to help us make more pizzas from our kitchen.
“Our aim is still the same – to deliver excellent tasty, traditional pizzas to customers within a four-mile radius of our home,” Rachael said.
The CasaGee’s team will also be on the road in 2024 catering at corporate events and mid-week weddings. Recently they’ve used a new marketing campaign which mixes the traditional with the modern. Rachael has created a character, Jimmy, a young boy who has been writing letters to local households about CasaGees pizza. She approached a friend’s son to write the letter, complete with typos, crossings out and doodles.
Rachael said: “I’m undertaking a 10,000 steps a day challenge, so I’ve been hand-delivering these letters from Jimmy, covering a different number of streets each day. This has helped the business and helped me reach my target of steps! So it’s been a win win!”
Later this year, the couple will be launching an online course for anyone who wants to set up an uber-local catering business within their own community.
*Image shows Gloucestershire pizza maker Elliott Richmond with some of their new team members Fin Tompkins, Ines Forrest, Paul Burt
