Cox Green twins to pitch pizza business on BBC's Dragons' Den

A pair of entrepreneurial twins from Cox Green are set to enter the Dragons’ Den to pitch their growing pizza business.

Luke and Owen Buckmaster will appear in front of the show’s panel of business experts during Thursday night’s episode on BBC One.

The non-identical twins are the founders of Doughboys Pizza – a company which supplies handmade Italian pizzas to hospitality businesses across the UK.

Back in 2020, the former Cox Green School duo set up the business after spotting a gap in the market for high quality frozen pizza bases for the hospitality industry.

The coronavirus pandemic threatened to derail their plans but the following year the company launched home pizza kits which allowed customers to recreate ‘restaurant quality’ pizzas from the comfort of their own homes.

After growing their business from a garage at their mother’s home in Maidenhead to a warehouse in Reading, they will now be vying to win the attention of one of the BBC’s business experts.

Luke, 24, said: “We had a friend who was running a pub, struggling to recruit chefs and in turn offer a reasonable standard food menu. We couldn’t really find any good, quality pizzas in the UK.

“All the ready-made frozen pizzas were really poor quality. Off the back of that we decided to have a look and see what Italy had to offer. With that being the motherland of pizza, we thought they must have better quality, readymade products than what the UK has.

“We found some really niche, small manufacturers in Italy who specialise in producing artisan, handmade pizza products which are then frozen.

“We just thought there was a huge opportunity to bring that to the UK.”

Doughboys Pizza has also now expanded to supply frozen readymade pizzas and has a partnership with online grocery delivery service Ocado.

The brothers started off life operating from their mother’s garage in Maidenhead but have now expanded to a warehouse in Reading, via a stint at White Waltham Business Park.

On Thursday, viewers will find out whether they were able to tempt business experts including Peter Jones and Deborah Meaden to invest in their growing pizza empire.

Luke added: “It’s a show that we’ve both loved since we were really young. We’ve always watched it so having the opportunity to appear on there was something we jumped at.

“We’re getting to the point where we know we’re going to have to bring in that additional expertise and we need people we can rely on with additional contacts and industry experience to help us grow.

“We fully recognise we are young, we don’t have tonnes of experience behind us, we haven’t been to university so we’re very much learning on the job.

“For us, appearing on Dragon’s Den wasn’t about the money, it was more about getting a Dragon on board to help speed up the growth of the company, recognise opportunities and grow in a much more efficient way.”

The company is re-launching its home pizza kits this week.

Visit www.doughboys.co.uk for further information.