Blending Two Food Staples To Produce A Winner

Pizza-baozzi.[Photo provided to China Daily]

For Alex Cree, the idea for a pizza-baozzi fusion brand was born on a trip to Guangdong.

In the summer of 2015, when Alex Cree was on a trip to Guangdong and having a conversation with clients and colleagues, he had no idea that he would soon be changing his career.

The American came from an investment banking and consulting background, and was a successful consultant focused on the Chinese food and beverage industry.

During the conversation, an American client praised Chinese baozi (steamed buns) for their taste and price, but complained that the fillings were not high quality and sometimes upset his stomach.

Then the whole group - comprising Chinese and Americans - started joking about putting Western fillings into Chinese baozi, and Cree said they should be called "Bao-zza".

The idea for a pizza-baozzi fusion stuck in his mind, and a year later, after developing recipes and business plans with partner Loren Heinold and other friends in Los Angeles, where he was living, Cree quit his job and returned to China to work full time on the project in mid-2016.

The idea was to take two common staple foods from the East and the West, and reinvent them, to create a new product that was unique, modern and delicious, according to Cree.

Their brainchild Baozza tastes like pizza but feels like baozi, except that the dough, which draws inspiration from both Western and Chinese cuisines, is a tasty, fragrant hybrid that includes baozi dough ingredients for texture and form, and a distinct blend of Italian herbs and cheese for flavor.

The product comes in four variants - - Margherita, Meat Lovers, BBQ Chicken and Spicy Hawaiian Jalape?o.

It took the team over a year of hard work to come up with the ingredients and the cooking methods, and to decide on the final recipes with help from both Western and Chinese chefs.

In July 2016, Cree and his team held their first pop-up event at UrWork, a co-working office space in Beijing, and sold almost 200 baozza in an hour and a half, even though people had never heard of anything like this before.