The first thing you need to know about Rick Schaper is that he threw a pizza party to raise money for a restaurant and raised zero dollars. The second thing is that he kept going anyway. A neighbor, a firefighter who’d missed the party, asked if Rick could leave one in the freezer for the next day. “That’s kind of where I got the idea,” Rick shared. Nobody writes business plans about freezing a pizza for the guy next door, but 20 years later Dogtown Pizza will produce 2 million of them this year alone.
“We’ve grown a little bit every year over the last 20 years,” Rick explained. “We’ve never gone down.” No dramatic spikes, no pivot moments. Just steady work and family. In the early years, Rick’s wife, Meredith, was bartending at Culpepper’s in the Central West End and waiting tables to keep the lights on while Rick built the business. All three of their sons now work in it. “It’s very rewarding to work with my children,” he said. “We love seeing our kids every day.” They try to have everyone over for dinner every few Sundays. The business and the family are not separate things. They never have been.
Ricky, the youngest, grew up as “The Pizza Guy” – a reputation that followed him from grade school through high school and eventually into the job he now holds managing production. He designed the manufacturing line in the facility they built four years ago, a plant capable of processing 5 million pizzas a year. He tracks everything, down to the 30 pizzas lost in a single minute of machine downtime. “I really want to see those numbers go up where they should be,” he shared, “or go down for the efficiency numbers.” The gap between where they are and what the line can handle doesn’t read as failure to him. It reads as the next thing to do.
Then there is the matter of the price. For 20 years, Dogtown Pizza has been held at $7.99. When Rick started, that made him the most expensive frozen pizza on the shelf. People told him he’d never sell an $8 frozen pizza. Today, $7.99 is middle-tier – which tells you everything you need to know about what has happened to the cost of food in this country, and everything you need to know about what Rick has refused to pass on to the people buying his pizza. He accomplished this by eliminating middlemen, buying direct and leveraging volume to negotiate with the same suppliers he’s had for nearly two decades. The same ham for 16 years. The same pizza sauce for 17. “If I could save 1 penny on the cardboard,” he said, “that’s one penny times 1.8 million pizzas.” That’s not a man cutting corners. That’s a man doing math in service of a principle.
The same ethic extends to the people who work for him. Nearly 50 employees. Wages that started at $8 an hour and now sit at $20 and above for most of the team. “Our employees mean everything,” he said. “We can’t do without the employees.” In a food industry that has long treated labor as the first place to find savings, this is not a small thing to say and, more importantly, it is not a small thing to actually do.
And underneath all of it: St. Louis. Rick has lived in this city his whole life, raised his family here, built his company here. At home, Dogtown Pizza is in Dierbergs, Schnucks and Straub’s, but getting there wasn’t handed to them. Rick spent years delivering samples to buyers who hung up on him, until the secretaries at Straub’s finally told management to give the kid 2 minutes. “They finally picked it up,” he said. That’s how most of it happened. One store at a time. But the ambition was never to stay small, it was to build something here worth sharing. Eight years ago, Central Market in Texas called after researching the best frozen pizzas in the country. Dogtown Pizza was their answer.
“Being a St. Louis business is big for me,” Rick said simply. The gratitude runs both directions. Every day, someone tells him they didn’t know Dogtown Pizza existed. Then they try it and then they become exactly the kind of loyal, evangelical customer that no marketing budget can buy.
Ricky talked about their most effective marketing strategy, and it is not an algorithm, an influencer or a carefully targeted digital campaign. It is people standing in grocery stores, cooking pizzas, handing out slices and telling the truth about what they’ve made. “I think that’s the key,” he said. “That’s how we’ve been successful for 20 years.”
Pay your people. Hold your price. Stay where you’re from. The dough doesn’t lie.
3843 Garfield Ave., St. Louis, dogtownpizza.com
This article appears in June 2026.