Gianpiero De Vallier, (Piero for short) is an Italian artisan baker with over twenty-five years’ experience in bakeries across Europe. With support from Cliona, his Irish wife, he established The Artisan Pizza Company (better known as Pizza da Piero) in November 2007. Since then, he has brought to the Irish market the highest quality artisan pizza bases you can find in Ireland.
Piero’s Pizza Bases are handcrafted by Piero and his team in Rathcoole, Co Dublin. Each base contains only 365 calories, and you can create your genuine Italian pizza in five minutes in your own home.
Piero takes care to delicately handcraft these bases to bring authentic Italian artisan flavour to your kitchen table. The bases are made using only natural ingredients and are made using the sourdough process with over two days of fermentation. This process is used very rarely by other bread and pizza manufacturers because so much skill and time is required. The result is that our dough is extremely healthy, digestible and full of that authentic Italian flavour.
Our story
The summer of 2007 was a busy one as we got married at Lake Bled in Slovenia and made the decision while on honeymoon that Piero would make a go of selling his delicious pizza bases. He had been working as an artisan bread baker for 15 years already at that stage and had developed his own particular recipe for these amazing pizza bases using a combination of flours and the sourdough method.
At the time we were living in our own terraced house in The Coombe and were delighted to get a stall at the Dublin Food Coop organic market, just a short walk down the road from us. We set up at the market every Thursday and Saturday and sold our pizzas there as cooked pizza with a range of toppings or in bags of three. The response we got was wonderful and the feedback so helpful. It gave us some great insight into our market and our product.
We knew soon enough that Piero needed a bigger space if we wanted to continue to grow the business. We started searching for a unit near our distributors Europa Foods in Rathcoole to keep logistics as simple as possible. Though it took a number of years to find the right space, we succeeded with a little persistence and a lot of determination. We are very fortunate now to be in our own space where Piero has the capacity to build and grow our small business, currently employing ten dedicated and hard-working members of staff.
