About Us

Rescue Pizza was founded in Portland, Oregon by Nick Mote and Sara Gates. Nick is a longtime tech entrepreneur with a professional background in food-service and pizza-making. Sara is a digital marketer and lifelong pizza obsessive.

Here's their (our) story. 

The Roots of Rescue Pizza

We live on a floating house on the Columbia River. It's a bit of a hike to "the mainland" grocery stores, and most delivery options don't serve our marina. So on lazy evenings, we tend to turn to frozen pizzas. At some point, we started calling them our "rescue pizzas", since they saved us from either a) having to cook or b) going to the store. 

But, every frozen pizza we tried, frankly, sucked. Even the priciest ones at the bougie grocery stores were never good: the sauce was bland, the crust never had that perfect doughy crunch, the toppings tasted watery and dull.

It was extra frustrating because we've always loved pizza. We respect it! Nick had spent years perfecting his homemade pizza dough recipe, and Sara made sauce from scratch for epic homemade pizza nights. But the whole process took at least 24 hours—not exactly compatible with those aforementioned lazy evenings. 

So Nick started tinkering again. Could he make and freeze a homemade pizza that would actually taste fresh once cooked? (And not be packed with sodium or artificial ingredients?)

Success and Daydreams

Shocker, the answer was yes. We figured it out—after dozens and dozens of recipe tests and freezing experiments—and started stocking our freezer with Rescue Pizzas.

The dough was handmade by Nick and the sauce by Sara, topped with local ingredients whenever possible, no chemicals or preservatives whatsoever, and flash-frozen—so the whole pie could come roaring back to life in a blasting hot oven. They were the best frozen pizzas we'd ever had. 

We started daydreaming about what our hypothetical Rescue Pizza company could be. We'd always envision a Toms-inspired "buy-one-give-one" model, where we could make a premium pizza worth paying a premium for, allowing us to sustainably donate the same high-quality meals to our neighbors in need.

And, we could even create true living-wage jobs, talking about how to design an organization that helped employees thrive, the kind of place we would be proud to work.

Pizza in the Time of Coronavirus

Then in the spring of 2020, coronavirus hit. Like everyone else, we began self-isolating as much as possible. We'd watch news coverage every night of hours-long lines at local food banks, and hear our quarantined friends with well-paid tech jobs complain about being so sick of cooking every night, but weren't able to safely leave their homes.

We started seriously considering that it might be the unlikely-but-perfect time to pursue Rescue Pizza. Once Sara was laid off from her full-time marketing job, with extra time on her hands, it became clear.

In April 2020, Rescue Pizza was officially born. We're chasing the mission we believe in to build our dream company.

And that's where you come in.

We're launching early batches of our first Cracked Black Pepperoni 10-inch pizzas on a limited basis. Sign up now to be one of the very first Rescue Pizza customers.

Because everyone deserves great pizza.