EMILY KNUDSEN

For almost 20 years, Emily’s known she wanted a pizza farm. “I went to my first one when I was 21. It was in Wisconsin, where I grew up. I grew up on a hobby farm, but this was on an actual farm with lots of acres and gardens and animals. I learned that these people basically lived off their land, like Mennonites, but without the religion. I loved being able to walk around their farm and the ability to bring my favorite bottle of wine. I remember thinking, ‘I want to own one someday,’ but I never said anything because what a weird thing!”

Today, Emily lives on a 50-acre hobby farm with her husband Bill. The farm includes a 13-acre homestead and 3 pastures. “Bill and I met when we were 29. He had bought the farm, which was originally on 90 acres, when he was 24 with his then-wife, Emily – a different Emily! – and built the house and barn. The barn was built as a horse barn because she had horses. When they split, Bill had to sell 40 acres. The land is all in a protected program, meaning it’s not crop land. It’s basically owned by the government, and you pay taxes on it.”

When Emily and Bill got together, she lived 90 minutes away in Red Wing on the Mississippi River. “I came down one Friday night after we had been together about 8 months and he said, ‘I think I’m going to do a wedding barn.’ I had been working weddings and banquets for 6 years, so I was like, ‘I don’t think so – I don’t think that’s something you want to get into, or, no offense, are capable of doing.’ I said to him, ‘if you do that, I’m out.’ But then I asked him, ‘what about a pizza farm?”

Like me, Bill had never heard of a pizza farm. “I told Bill to come to Red Wing that week because there was this pizza farm there that was only open on Tuesdays. At first, he was like, ‘I don’t know. I’m not really interested,’ but by Sunday he decided we should go. We were there for only 15 minutes before he was like, ‘oh my god, I could do this.’ The one in Red Wing started out as a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture). They baked bread and pastries, but they had a wood-fired oven, so they decided to make pizza to make a little more money when customers came to pick up their stuff. They never put out any signs or did any advertising. They would sell 400 pizzas on a Tuesday night. I think they might be closed now because they were older. Today, when people open a pizza farm, they follow the rules of no advertising. We have clean farms where everyone takes their own trash. Pizza farms started out as BYOB until Wisconsin made a law that doesn’t allow that anymore. Now you need to buy from the farm.”

Since Emily is in MN, the BYOB law doesn’t apply to her. Pleasant Grove Pizza Farm opened in 2015 and from the moment Bill was on board in 2013, Emily was ready. “Right away I was excited. I started walking around the barn and thinking, ‘ok, if we do this where would we build a kitchen in here? Where would the ovens go?’ We looked at our 3 pastures and thought, ‘ok, this would be the parking lot because this is where the driveway comes in, this middle one we’ll keep, and the third comes out of the barn which makes it perfect for a dining area.’ Building the kitchen was great because Bill and his dad were in construction and carpentry. The hard parts were the fine details of getting food and health and planning and zoning involved. We thought, ‘how are we going to be licensed as a business, period?’ Food and health said we needed certified ovens, so Bill researched, and we now have 2 Forno Bravos. Within our second year we got the second one.”

With everything in place at Pleasant Grove Pizza Farm, the next learning curve was learning to meet demand. “We’d have over a 2 hour wait and we weren’t even busy then. 1, we didn’t even know what we were doing and 2, we originally had 1 oven. We bought a bigger oven and learned how to streamline. It was a 2-year process. Bill really focused on the dough and the sauce. We made a lot of changes to the sauce. At one point, people would say, ‘oh, there’s chicken stock in the sauce? I can’t have it, I’m vegan.’ Dialing it in and making sure most people could eat it was a big process. I always wonder about comparing our 1st sauce to our current one.”

With key elements dialed in, Emily created the pizzas. “I came up with the flavors and made sure it left everyone needing that next bite. I was literally researching ingredients to make sure their profiles matched. No offense to places that just throw stuff on there, I just want it to be memorable and phenomenal. Our most popular, because we are in the Midwest, is the Pig and Pork. It’s red sauce, sausage, pepperoni, and green olive. Our #2 is the Pig and Pork without green olives. You can’t make this shit up. Or it’s 1/2 green olive. The favorite of the people who come here a lot and have tried all of our pizzas is the Sweet Georgia Pie. It has garlic infused EVOO, garlic seasoning, prosciutto, honey, goat cheese, and a little mozzarella to bind it all together. We top it with fresh arugula that we grow, and it has this sweet, salty, and umami flavor. It’s everything – the tartness of the goat cheese, too! If I’m at the front desk or going over the menu with a customer, I’m like, ‘I can’t exactly tell you what it tastes like, so you have to trust me,’ and 9/10 times they come back and tell me, ‘You’re right! I loved it and I can’t describe it.’”

Emily’s personal favorite is the Mediterranean style. “It has basil infused olive oil, fresh basil, kalamata olives, tomatoes, shredded mozzarella, and fresh mozzarella.” Her runner up is the Buster. “There’s a theme here, and you’re getting it. I don’t like red sauce. This has wild mushrooms, sage infused olive oil, garlic seasoning, sausage, caramelized onions, fresh mushrooms, basil, shredded mozzarella, and fresh mozzarella.”

Pleasant Grove Pizza Farm grows as many ingredients as they can for their pizzas. “I grow basil, tomatoes, green onions, garlic, arugula, peppers – we have a supreme pizza so lots of peppers – herbs like mint and sage, and beets. We do a weekly feature and, in the fall, when our garden is abundant, I’ll use what’s accessible like beans, zucchini, and spaghetti squash. I tried potatoes but they were hard. We also grow pumpkins for the fall. Oh, and so many different types of hot peppers: jalapenos, habaneros, etc. We’ll have them sliced and they can add them to any pizza. We have watermelon this year, but we don’t really sell it. I just put it out and let people take it because there’s so much. I guess we also have Brussel sprouts, cauliflower, and broccoli. Plus, sunflowers. Last year we started doing a lot of flowers. I’m going to have a flower section as well. I can’t monitor the garden. If someone’s out there and they take a tomato, I can’t stop them. We’ve had customers go and take fresh basil. We also let someone put bee boxes on our land and they make honey. We have staff that help us, since I don’t garden – I have too much other stuff to do!”

Pleasant Grove Pizza Farm has been Emily’s sole focus since 2020. “March 17th, 2020, I stopped doing event planning. I don’t know if you remember that date! I was the Event Manager for a Holiday Inn Banquet Center and they said to go home, and I just had this feeling that I was never going back there. Covid was actually a benefit for us because we are outdoor dining, and you bring your own everything. It was very safe for everyone and that was when our takeout really took off. We were featured in the New York Times food section and that was awesome for us. We were on a cooking show on the Magnolia Network, and they came and filmed here. It was kind of a conversation like, ‘ok, you lost your job, but we have these two huge media spotlights. Do we take it and run with it?’”

Emily and Bill ran with it and throughout Covid, their numbers increased. “I was ready for it to be honest because being the owner of the business, you do everything from finances to marketing to scheduling to hiring to firing to creating pizzas to being the operations manager. I was ready to submerse myself into being here full time. It’s still really hard, but I enjoy it. My phone goes off literally every 5 minutes – there’s an email, or staff, or an event, or a donation. We added a mobile unit last year and have a ton of events scheduled. I booked us for more private events, breweries, and wineries. This year, I have more staff than we’ve ever had. Four people said they are coming back from the past. Our mobile unit staff and farm staff have some crisscross. I’ve created a schedule so that the mobile goes out and we sell from 4-8pm. Bill manages the mobile unit and I stay here and manage the farm. Keeping it super simple works the best. This year I was a lot pickier about what we do. A part of the learning process is that you cannot just say yes to everything. Our kitchen staff comes Tuesday and Wednesday and our dough gal comes Wednesday-Sunday. She makes dough fresh every morning and afternoon and preps it for the mobile, too. We do somewhere around 500 pizzas a weekend between mobile, the farm, and takeout and delivery to a brewery.”

Over the years, Emily and Bill have learned to do things their way. “People ask us, ‘what’s your style?’ It’s very thin, like crispy, crackery, but we roll the crust. People are always asking us if we’re going to compete, but it dawned on me that, ‘Bill, we can never do this because we use a rolling pin to roll out our dough.’ That’s how green Bill and I were! I suppose I got a rolling pin because that’s what my mom would use, and our pizzas are 16 inches. Apparently, there’s a way to do it, but we never learned it. And now, that’s the way we taught our staff.”

Pleasant Grove Pizza Farm is 90 minutes south of Minneapolis. “Most of our customers are from Minneapolis. We open from 4-8 to take orders. People wait 2-3 hours for pizza. But how do you not fall in love with it? You get to bring your own chair, you can bring a vase of flowers, you can do everything – from a simple blanket on the ground to a beautiful set up. I love it. I love seeing people just gathering. Very rarely do you see people on cellphones. Kids aren’t on tablets. It’s a very safe place to be and chill and be a part of nature and connect with one another. We have walking trails and live music. Each pizza farm is a little different and offers different things.”

The live music has proven to be a huge hit at Pleasant Grove Pizza Farm. “We decided to dive into live music because Bill really loves music and people have absolutely loved it, especially since it’s outdoors and people would rather sit outside and enjoy music. You don’t find that as much around here. We book a lot of Folk Americana music which is very fitting.”

Emily has hopes to continue expanding and offering unique experiences. “People don’t really have a frame of reference. There’s no paradigm because we’re so unique. I don’t want to become known as a private event space. I want to remain a pizza farm. We make more money being open to the public but I would love to build a pavilion so we can host private events. I’d love a second mobile unit and I would love, love, love – I am going to have it someday – a collaborative cooking show. There’s a production company in town nearby, but my grant didn’t come through this time. I’m not giving up on it. I do have a handful of guests that are going to collaborate. One is a beef farmer, so I’ll use her beef and create a pizza. She’ll come and I’ll interview her, and we’ll make it together. We only grow when we work together. Financially, where would some of these ideas take us? We have to understand what is financially best for the business and if it’s not right for the current moment, put it on the shelf, and it may be right in the future.”

As a woman in pizza, Emily has faced some micro-aggressions. “When we were in Las Vegas, there was a guy who called me as we were leaving our 1st day of the Expo and said, ‘I’m glad you’re there. Now, you can see how small you are.’ He’s also a man, so men can say this stuff. I can be a mouthy person, but in that moment, and maybe because I’m a woman, I was waiting for him to say, ‘you know, because I realize that when I go to Expo,’ – something humbling. And then he tells me that I need to stay somewhere better and he’s listing recommendations and dropping names of steakhouses and saying, ‘oh, my friend owns it, but you probably can’t get in. if you want me to make you a phone call, I can probably get you in tonight.’ He has done that since the conception of Pleasant Grove Pizza Farm. He’s been there several times and he likes our pizza, but he would never talk to Bill that way.” Luckily, for the most part, things have been going really well for Emily. “I think because we are so unique and quiet out here, I just haven’t necessarily run into a lot of misogynistic men. It’s been good!”

Emily’s advice is to not be afraid to ask questions. “My biggest thing is to take advantage of all the resources. There are all these agencies that are here to help you and guide you. You shouldn’t be afraid of your health department or planning or zoning. There are going to be tough times, but you must push through it. Don’t quit and don’t give up because there are plenty of people out there who want to help and share their knowledge. I want to share what I’ve learned so that it’s easier for you. Small business is very important. We need small businesses of every kind in every community to make the community work.”

Pleasant Grove Pizza Farm is a special place. It’s a pizza farm on 50 acres of land in southern MN that makes woodfired pizza out of their barn where people dine in what was once a horse pasture while enjoying live music, walking along trails, seeing animals (they have a llama, alpaca, and goats), and soaking up lots of sunshine. You bring your own tables, chairs, beverages, snacks, treats, desserts, trash bags, and games and hang out with your friends and family. And Emily’s staff have become her friends. “I don’t have to go out anywhere anymore. We close at 8 and are cleaned up by 8:30/9 and get drinks and hang out. So many different people work for us. We’re all from different walks of life and we can just sit and be together without judgement. We’ll be hanging out in the barn, and customers will come up to us and say, ‘this is the best pizza I’ve ever had!’ I can’t even comprehend how we make the best pizza people have ever had. We’re all just nobodies who have never been in the pizza industry. We’re just us!” But as Emily and Bill say, “Pizza is literally for everyone. It’s the most magical food that covers all spectrums!”

Emily is bold, eager, and sincere and the farm is an extension of her. She’s proof that being true to yourself and your dreams pays off. She’s fostered an environment of inclusivity, warmth, and joy, that draws people from all over. Next time you’re in MN, head to Pleasant Grove Pizza Farm to share a slice with Emily and experience this truly unique dining experience yourself!