This new food truck started with a love story and a cross-country pizza honeymoon
Melissa and Samuel Ranz’s love story started with pizza.
Samuel, 28, was so nervous when Melissa showed up for an interview at the large pizza company where he worked that he asked another manager to meet with her instead.
“She is way too beautiful,” he said.
A mural on the wall of the company’s training facility read: “You stole a pizza my heart.”
Samuel did.
They married in 2020 and last December took a belated honeymoon road trip across the country, researching pizza at every stop.
Last weekend the couple celebrated the grand opening of their new pizza food truck in East Pierce County. They call their business Just a Pizza My Mind.
They spent the first weekend, Dec. 16 and 17 at Fierce County Cider in South Hill. The couple live in Pacific and plan to take the truck (called Jackie) to breweries and other locations across Pierce County. They’ll announce their schedule at https://streetfoodfinder.com/justapizzamymind and at https://sites.google.com/view/justapizzamymind/home.
The idea to start their own business started taking off in May 2021 after they were both laid off from the large company.
They set up a Facebook page with a menu, began marketing and started delivering pizzas from a small commercial kitchen.
“We really just decided to take a chance on ourselves,” Melissa Ranz, 27, said.
They checked out the food-truck scene in San Francisco on their honeymoon trip, drove Route 66, and visited Florida, North Carolina and New York, among other places.
They had pizza in every town.
Places featured on Guy Fieri’s TV show “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives” inspired many of their stops.
A pizza in Arizona that had salmon, a cream-based sauce and onions was one of their favorites. A Cajun shrimp pizza in Louisiana was also a hit.
The couple swears they weren’t even close to being tired of pizza by the end of the adventure.
That shows when they talk about their menu.
The Just a Pizza My Mind food truck menu
Melissa’s childhood friend, 27-year-old Seirra Potter, remembers having pizzas all the time growing up that Melissa and her sisters would make.
Then Potter and her husband were guinea pigs as the couple developed the food truck menu.
“They made probably like 10 different pizzas for us to try,” she said. “What’s awesome is that most of the ones they made that day are the pizzas that they’re currently selling.”
Potter’s favorite is the sacre bleu pizza, which has Swiss cheese, diced ham, chicken, pizza cheese, parmesan and a sweet dijon drizzle.
“They found their spot,” Potter said. “I’m just really happy for them.”
Samuel loves pulled pork sandwiches. That inspired their midnight porker pizza, which has Swiss cheese, savory pulled pork, onion crisps and tangy barbecue sauce.
“The whole menu tells a story,” he said.
For example, the “what’s going on?” pizza is a reference to their state of mind after they were laid off. It has house ranch, pizza cheese, parmesan, chicken, sausage, green onion and ricotta.
The “to put it bluntly” pizza is a reference to Melissa’s penchant for speaking her mind. It has spicy cream cheese, bacon, sausage, jalapeno, red pepper flakes, a colby jack-parmesan blend and a hot drizzle.
Melissa likes their Krusty Crab pizza, which she said has a “whole burger vibe.”
It has beef, onion, pickles, colby jack cheese, ketchup, mustard and is “better than you could ever imagine,” she said.
They also have pizza poppers that are a hit with kids, Melissa said, and are “almost as if you took a slice of pizza, rolled it up and rolled it through more flavor.”
Michael Tienda, the manager who interviewed Melissa that first day, said he thinks the couple created something special with their pizzas and their partnership. The couple’s life is like a romantic movie, he said — he was the best man at their wedding.
“Everything just seemed to fit perfectly for them,” Tienda said.
They’re both caring, driven people, he said, and he thinks their customers will see that.
Melissa Ranz said their motto is to: “Be bold, burn bright.”
Like their pizza.
This story was originally published December 18, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
