250 – 350 ° C. Potential uses include late-night hotel food service, allowing staff to prepare a hot meal after the main kitchen team has finished work.
Each pizza is stretched and topped by hand, using ingredients including DOP San Marzano tomatoes, before being par-baked on volcanic stone at around 450 ° C. The dough and tomato sauce contain no additives or preservatives.
The pizzas then pass through a liquid-nitrogen freezing tunnel at DoughLAB’ s 2,000 sq m factory in Szigetszentmiklós. The cryogenic process freezes them rapidly, producing smaller ice crystals than slower freezing methods to help preserve the dough’ s open structure and the texture of the toppings.
The facility represents an investment of approximately 1.5 billion Hungarian forints and was designed for an initial capacity of around 27,000 pizzas a day, with scope to increase this to 100,000. Hand-stretching remains part of the production process at both volumes.
Josep added:“ The easiest way to increase output would be to automate everything. But if you press this type of dough mechanically, you can destroy the structure that gives a Neapolitan pizza its characteristic rim. Working with living dough at this scale is difficult, but that is exactly why we decided to keep hand-stretching as part of the process.”
Madre is already available in Hungary. DoughLAB plans to supply UK hospitality businesses through distributors and foodservice wholesalers, alongside direct supply agreements with retail chains.
The DoughLAB produces Neapolitan-style sourdough pizza for hospitality and retail under the Madre brand. Its production facility is in Szigetszentmiklós, near Budapest.
www. thedoughlab. eu
[ 1 ]
British Chambers of Commerce, Quarterly Recruitment Outlook, 8 April 2026.
[ 2 ]
Craft Guild of Chefs, reporting CV-Library recruitment data, 13 July 2026. These figures refer to job advertisements, rather than a count of unfilled positions.
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