Interview with Nick Croft-Simon, Co-Founder of White Rabbit

This week we caught up with Nick Croft-Simon, Co-Founder of White Rabbit.

Can you tell us the story behind White Rabbit Pizza, what inspired you both to start the brand? 

The White Rabbit pub in Oxford is our namesake - it's where Teo, my Co-Founder, and I met in 2015. Teo was working as a chef in the kitchen and had just introduced his family's pizza recipes to the menu, and I was behind the bar. The pub started to get really popular, not least because of the incredible pizza we were serving, and naturally we started getting requests from customers who couldn't eat gluten.

It dawned on us just how many people were missing out on authentic & great quality pizza because of allergies & intolerances. It sparked the idea for the brand, and we decided to keep White Rabbit in the name as an authentic nod to our beginnings (it’s also quite a cool name, which helps!). 

How did you ensure the final recipes met both artisanal quality and scale requirements?  

That’s a constant evolution but I would say the single biggest factor here is having our own bakery, built from scratch by us and for us. It just gives us infinitely more variables to play with. The reason we chose to build our own manufacturing in the first place was because no one could make the product how we wanted, and over the last 10 years we have continued to double down on that thinking. It’s what makes us special.

We are in control of every constituent part of our product. We choose our own ingredients, we design our own machinery, we hire our own people, we create our own processes. It allows a level of detail & customisation that we just couldn’t get otherwise; as far as we know, our process for making gluten-free pizza dough is unique to the industry. It’s brought with it its own challenges, and progress hasn’t always been linear, but we couldn’t have got where we are today without our bakery.

It’s a hell of a lot easier to translate a kitchen recipe into a scaled-up process when it’s all happening under one roof and one set of values & principles. Everyone in our business knows we are about compromise free taste & quality, that we only use the best ingredients and that we make food we and our consumers can be proud of.

Where can you buy White Rabbit Pizza?  

The majority of our range is in Chilled Free From, but it spans Frozen & Ambient too. You can find us stocked in Sainsbury’s, Ocado, Morrisons, Waitrose, Co-op, Wholefoods and Booths. 

Where would you like to be in 5 years’ time?  

Our aim is to continue leading the category. To always be at the forefront, championing our consumers and pushing the limits of what’s possible in gluten-free. So, I would love for us to build that reputation of being the undisputed benchmark for what great can look like in Free From. We want to be the gold standard in the Free From category at large, not just in pizza & Italian food.

Are there any dream collaborations?  

I’m obsessed with space, so this is a bit left field, but I’d love to run a collab with NASA. Maybe we could send some gluten-free pizza up into space. Any coeliac astronauts please hit us up!

What would your ideal day in London be like? 

I pretty much do this every year for my birthday! It starts with brunch at Dover Street Market. It’s such a hidden gem but on the top floor they have the most incredible café. Then it would be a trip to the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition, which usually comes out exactly on my birthday every year, at the Natural History Museum. Next, I would go to a spa I recently discovered called Cloud 9 in Notting Hill, or the AIRE ancient baths near Charring Cross. They’re both dreamy and SO relaxing.

Then, because I’m a massive nerd, I would go to Draughts in Waterloo, which is a board game café that literally has every game you could ever think of. Finally, I would end with dinner at Zephyr, which is a Greek restaurant in Notting Hill. Firstly, the food is insanely good, and being Greek myself, it also has that added heritage factor. As a bonus activity, if there’s time to squeeze in a late-night viewing at the Electric Cinema on Portobello Road, I would do that. You can lie down on ginormous sofas - it’s a cinema experience like no other!

For more information on White Rabbit click here.

Photo courtesy fo White Rabbit