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August 10, 2026
APPLETON – Creative Crusts has opened a pickup storefront at 5700 W. Clairemont Drive, Suite 403, in Appleton, making it easier for customers to grab the company’s pizzas and lasagnas.
Co-owner Shawn Brokaw said the location is for pickup only and does not offer dine-in service, or serve as the company’s manufacturing facility.
Brokaw said the new location is stocked full of Creative Crusts’ traditional, specialty and weekly specials of pizzas and lasagnas.
“Over the last few years [that] we’ve been making our crusts have been unbelievable with the growth we’ve seen,” he said. “It’s both exciting and stressful, but that comes with business ownership. Everybody likes our business plan and the trajectory we’re going, so we’re getting more creative with how we’re attacking this. We’re finding more resources that can help us.”
The Business News first featured Creative Crusts in its March 19, 2024 issue when the company was first entering the market.
Since then, Brokaw said the company has continued to refine its products while expanding its reach – with its chicken-based crusts remaining at the center of its strategy and the pickup location its latest sign of growth.
What’s in a crust
The chicken-based crusts, Brokaw said, are gluten-free, high in protein, don’t contain flour and are keto-friendly.
When they first launched the business, Brokaw said they operated out of Union Kitchen Collective in Kaukauna, a shared commercial kitchen that allows food entrepreneurs to reduce start-up and operating costs by sharing space and equipment with other emerging businesses.
Before long, he said they outgrew that space and relocated to a facility in Chilton, allowing it to increase production capacity and support its growing business.
“We went to Chilton into an old pizza restaurant, and that’s where we were able to make a lot more pizzas – we have grown it from there,” he said. “It was a little bakery back when I was growing up. We can only do so much with the electrical, so eventually, we’ll be looking for somewhere else to manufacture the crusts and make the pizzas.”
Brokaw said the company continues to manufacture its crusts at its Chilton facility, where it can produce about 1,200 crusts in roughly six hours.
If 1,200 crusts are produced on a Wednesday, he said the remainder of the week is largely devoted to assembling the finished pizzas.
Looking ahead, Brokaw said the company hopes to relocate its manufacturing operation to a larger facility, increasing production capacity from about 1,200 crusts to as many as 20,000.
“Then we could sell the crusts to bars and restaurants as a standalone,” he said. “Those places can offer their own pizza combined with our crusts. We’re now in every single Woodman’s in Wisconsin except for one, which is still under construction. In total, I think we’re in 60 different locations that are selling our crusts.”
According to the company’s website (creativecrustswi.com), a standard Creative Crusts pepperoni pizza has about 740 calories – about half of what a traditional gluten-based pizza crust of the same size would equal.
“That same pizza would have 86 grams of protein compared to about 34 grams of protein,” he said. “It would also have about one-sixth of the carbs because it’s not made out of refined flour.”
For more on Creative Crusts, visit its Facebook page or aforementioned website.
