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Meet Nathan Coury of Freak Brothers Pizza in Downtown Phoenix

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Today we’d like to introduce you to Nathan Coury.

So, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
I was working at a digital marketing agency after I graduated from college, but I wasn’t loving it. I went soul searching for a year or two, including attending Burning Man, and got really clear on the type of person I wanted to become: someone who helps a massive amount of people live a healthier and more fulfilling life while having a ton of fun doing it!

Kind of on a whim, I started cooking wood-fired pizzas at my brother & co-owner Jamil’s trail running races in 2014 out of a mobile brick oven our friend built on the back of a converted truck bed. I started to fall in love with the idea, and we soon expanded to cooking at music, art, and food festivals all around the valley, as well as private parties. We’ve cooked at events with as little as 20 people and as much as 15,000!

After the first year, I started dreaming about opening a centrally-located permanent shop in Phoenix as part of a unique concept that focuses on community building, cooperation, and conscious business practices. When Jamil met the developers of The Churchill, it was a perfect match! We’ve been cooking pizza at our downtown Phoenix shop since September 2018 and we absolutely love serving our community healthy, nourishing, and delicious pizza every day.

We have loved growing with the different audiences we’ve served at events over the last few years, most of which we are active participants ourselves. Some of the communities we serve are trail runners, the vegan/plant-based community, gluten-free enthusiasts, music & art lovers, festival-goers, and of course brick oven pizza aficionados. We love serving at events we’d pay to be at anyways.

Has it been a smooth road?
It’s definitely not been a smooth road, but we’ve gotten a lot of help along the way. I had never worked in a restaurant before I started the business, so it was a steep learning curve to understand how to create a consistent, high-quality product. I achieved this by working at Chipotle and mastering every position, learning from my managers there and the more restaurant-savvy employees I hired, and through self-learning including watching YouTube videos, attending pizza conferences, and of course an immense amount of trial and error.

We also started this business without any outside funding sources, with my brother Jamil being the primary investor who also shares some resources from his running events business he’s been operating for a decade. All of that paired with the immense amount of time & physical labor it takes to prepare for, set up, work, breakdown, and clean up from events each weekend has made this an extremely challenging yet deeply rewarding journey.

Fortunately, we’ve now attracted and cultivated enough incredible talent that things are running much smoother and easier with my team of super friends I can trust. I’m grateful for the struggle as it taught me so much about myself & shaped my character in many ways, and I’m also excited for this next chapter to be even more enjoyable and exciting.

We’d love to hear more about your business.
We create food & experiences that nourish people body, mind, and soul. I don’t think this level of a mission is common for most pizza companies, but this is why I do what I do.

I’m passionate about creating positive transformation in myself, my team, our community, and our planet. We’re a very purpose-driven, people-focused business. Our goal is to leave each person better than we found them, whether that’s a co-worker, customer, supplier, or really any human we interact with.

We strive to live each day better than our last, and we understand that every day is an opportunity to get better in some small way. We also work to take care of each other and take care of ourselves the best that we can. Self-care is super important, especially in our industry, and I do my best to set the example through my dedication to my yoga, meditation, running, sleep, writing, and healthy eating practices.

It’s from these values & priorities that we make decisions for our business such as selecting 100% organic & non-GMO flour, organic produce & natural meats when available, and to offer any of our pizzas to be made vegan or gluten-free. And I say we because ultimately this is a group effort and I do my best to take in the feedback of all my employees, customers, communities, and other co-creators who make our business what it is.

In addition to feeding people’s bodies high-quality food, we also understand the importance of human connection, and we think it’s just as important to consider the energy and words we feed our customers in our interactions as it is the food we make them. Because of this, I’m highly selective on who we hire – they have to have the right intentions, energy, and vibe. We hire for character first, not skill. We want people who are excited by the idea of serving others, contributing to the team, and working to better themselves each day. One result of setting these type of standards is that our employees consistently say they feel better at the end of their shift than when we arrive, and we think that’s pretty phenomenal.

Finally, I’m also selective about the types of events we vend at – we love supporting communities that care about health, fitness, art/music/creative expression, healing, and human connection. Serving our nourishing pizza to attendees of these events is our way of showing our support to these movements that we also care about by helping attendees to have an even better event experience & to ensure the growth and longevity of the organizations creating these events.

What’s your outlook for the industry over the next 5-10 years?
In the next 5-10 years, I see our industry making a shift to care immensely more about the total impact of the ingredients we choose to serve. Not just food cost, but true cost to our health, our planet, and our communities.

On that note, I see the whole food, plant-based movement exponentially growing and taking over mainstream food choices in restaurants. I see people rapidly waking up to the realization that overall, the meat and dairy industries in how they’re run are causing massive damage to our health, our planet, and our humanity, and there’s a huge amount of research and data that supports this.

A predominantly plant-based lifestyle is beneficial for human health, animal welfare, and planetary healing & sustainability. And fortunately, with all the mind-blowingly delicious plant-based alternatives coming out now, I think it can be a relatively smooth shift for us to transition to a world that is predominantly plant-based without losing anything we love about great food experiences.

I also see a shift coming from restaurant owners & workers asking “how can I make the best food experience for my customer, no matter what I sacrifice in the process?” to “how can I truly make the lives of everyone I interact with here better, including customers, employees, and myself?” Great food is awesome, but if in the process we sacrifice genuine human connection & honoring one’s health and happiness, I don’t care how good your food is because no real fulfillment will be found.

I’m excited for us to be a model for what a business looks like when human-fulfillment-maximization is the priority, over simply profit-maximization or taste-bud maximization. I’m extremely transparent on how I run my business, and I will be finding more and more ways to share the wisdom I’ve learned on this path with other business owners looking to do things a little differently. We’ve been pretty stoked with our results so far.

Pricing:

  • Our 12″ personal pizzas range from $10-$13
  • Our Lebanese family-recipe hummus & tabouli are $7
  • Our selection of healthy, delicious drinks range from $2-$5

Contact Info:

Getting in touch: VoyagePhoenix is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition please let us know here.

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