A few decades ago, Lee Kindell owned a catering hostel and boutique hotel in Seattle where he made pizza for travelers as a way to make them feel welcome and share stories over good food.
The pizza was so good that guests often told Kindell he should open his own restaurant. He thought it sounded like a good long-term plan but something he could do after he retired from the hotel business.
But then came COVID.
“We lost our business, and I said, ‘You know, that retirement plan of making pizzas, we’re going to do it now.'”
Fast forward to today, and Kindell operates one of Seattle’s (and America’s) hottest restaurant concepts. In just two years, MOTO Pizza has expanded from one temporary location to three permanent locations with more on the way and a location inside T-Mobile Stadium where Kindell’s team serves hungry Mariner fans pizzas during every home game.
If you want to get your hands on one of MOTO’s artisanal pizzas, you have to get there early (in other words, right after opening or, in the case of T-Mobile, the first few innings) and have a little luck. If you’re okay with waiting, you can add your name to the monthly waiting list that MOTO announces on its website and social media every few weeks.
When asked if the waiting list was some kind of marketing gimmick, Kindell says it was unnecessary.
“When we first opened, we waited four hours,” Kindell told me. “Now we’re going to make 250 pizzas a night in one place, and it’s all out of date.”
MOTO’s POS system powers the scheduling of pizzas, but it’s far from the only use of technology Kindell has embraced as he looks for ways to scale his business.
“When I hurt my arm, I had to stop making dough by hand and use a mixer,” Kindell said. “When I started using the mixer, I realized that the delta between making dough by hand and the machine was not that far.”
Kindell began looking for other ways to use the technology. It wasn’t long before he heard about another Seattle company, Picnic, that makes pizza robots. Now, he uses the Picnic robot to add cheese, sauce, and toppings to hundreds of pizzas every day and wants more technology.
“Now, I’ve been reaching out to everyone, drone delivery, street delivery robots. Everything I can think of.”
According to Kindell, his use of technology has gotten his pizza into the hands of more customers. He also reshaped his processes and pizza formats, if necessary, to reach more customers. At T-Mobile Park, where MOTO serves a thousand or more pizzas each night, Kindell and his team created a new single-serve pizza size that fits in the hand like a cell phone.
“Think about how comfortable that phone is in your hand,” Kindell said, holding his phone. “I wanted the piece to be so comfortable in your hand.”
While much of Kindell’s early success is due to hard work and his embrace of new technology, he’ll be the first to tell you some of it — especially MOTO’s presence on the big league ball scene — has to do with luck.
When Kindell saw a few boys eating his pizza in a front yard in West Seattle, he asked how they liked it. After they told him he could survive in New York, he asked what they were doing here, and they said they worked for the Seattle Mariners.
“I asked one of them, ‘How do I enter the stadium, who do I talk to?’ He said, ‘I.’ “
Long lines and rapid growth have drawn a lot of attention to MOTO, including from investors. But, while investors are “knocking on the door,” Kindell said he’s in no rush as he finds a way to use technology to scale his processes to take his idea across the country.
“I want to be proactive with everything I do because when the time comes, I’ll have my system and ready to go so I can do it in stadiums everywhere. I can do it in the grocery store, and in towns and cities.”
Hopefully, at that time, there will be no waiting.