Miyoko’s Creamery’s Pizza Tour to Give Away 10,000 Free Vegan Pizzas

|Updated Sep 27, 2021
Instagram/@miyokoscreamery

Miyoko’s Creamery is celebrating the launch of its new liquid vegan mozzarella by bringing the innovative dairy-free cheese to vegan cheese skeptics across the nation. Beginning on September 24, the vegan cheese giant went on the road to host “Miyoko’s Mind-Blowing, World-Changing, Phenomenally Vegan Pizza Tour” which aims to give away 10,000 free pizzas that will feature the new plant-based mozzarella. The tour will last one month in an effort to persuade pizza lovers to try the brand’s innovative dairy-free topping.

Miyoko’s food truck will travel across the United States “Pizza Belt” to tackle the consumer base with the highest pizza demand. The cities will include Philadelphia (September 24-27), Charlottesville (October 1), Richmond (October 2), New York City (October 8-9 and 21-24), and Boston (October 11-17).

“My goal was to create a vegan cheese worthy of pizza,” Miyoko’s Creamery founder and CEO Miyoko Schinner told VegNews. “A vegan pizza cheese that is so good that pizza lovers cannot believe it is vegan and inspires people to change their cheese to change the world.”

Miyoko’s cashew milk-based cheese spent years in development to replicate the melt of traditional mozzarella cheese. The company spent years working on the new liquid cheese to perfect the melting process so that pizzerias nationwide would want to include the cheese alternative on their menus. The company decided to rethink the recipe and removed the solid ingredients that reduce melting capacity, allowing for a cheese product that would not need to be shredded to top a pizza.

Leading up to the food truck tour, Miyoko’s Creamery teamed up with Northern California pizza chain Pizza My Heart to test the dairy-free mozzarella. Following positive consumer and user responses, the brand decided to attempt to expand its product range. The tour aims to market the liquid cheese to pizza companies nationwide after proving to be a success in Northern California.

“While Pizza My Heart has offered vegan options, we haven’t always done it well,” Pizza My Heart CEO Spencer Glenn said in a statement. “We have long searched for a mozzarella with the taste profile that would appeal beyond the hardcore vegan community. This is the first vegan mozzarella that we’ve tasted that can do that.”

Schinner launched Miyoko’s Creamery in 2014 to infiltrate a growing plant-based dairy market, hoping to use her years of expertise to provide consumers with the best-tasting plant-based cheese. Schinner’s model combined old techniques for cheese-making with revolutionary technologies and ingredients to mimic the taste, texture, and melting ability of cheese. Over recent years, Miyoko’s Creamery offers more than 25 products at approximately 20,000 retailers nationwide. Now, the company is working to enter the foodservice sector.

“With Miyoko’s Cultured Vegan Pizza Mozz, we truly believe everyone, including our customers who are omnivores, have lactose intolerance, or other dietary issues, don’t need to sacrifice taste and texture to enjoy our delicious pies and slices,” Glenn continued.

Beyond providing for a growing vegan consumer base, the company is also dedicated to promoting sustainability in production and distribution. In contrast to the worldwide dairy industry, Miyoko’s boasts that its new Liquid Vegan Pizza Mozzarella generates 98 percent less greenhouse gas emissions than its animal-based counterpart. Conventional mozzarella accounts for 90 percent of cheese production in the United States, meaning that Miyoko’s new plant-based product intends to undercut the environmentally harmful byproducts of this cheese production.

Earlier this summer, Miyoko’s secured a $52 million Series C funding round. The company announced that this investment package would be dedicated to expansion into the foodservice sector and additional retailers nationwide. The company also expanded its research and development team to accelerate its product development across all dairy categories with the liquid mozzarella at the forefront.

Following the food truck tour, Miyoko’s Liquid Vegan Pizza Mozzarella will be available at Sprouts locations on October 18. Starting in January 2022, the new plant-based product will become available at additional retail partners across the US.