Hungarian pizza producer The DoughLAB is bringing its Madre range to the UK market and is actively seeking distributors, foodservice wholesalers and retail partners for a product built around a 48-hour fermentation process and a liquid sourdough culture originating from Altamura in southern Italy.

The Madre dough uses an active liquid starter fed daily at the facility rather than a commercially dried powder. Hydration sits at approximately 80%, and fermentation runs for 48 hours before stretching and topping by hand. Ingredients include DOP San Marzano tomatoes, and neither the dough nor the tomato sauce contains additives or preservatives.

The first bake takes place on volcanic stone at around 450°C at DoughLAB's 2,000 sq m factory in Szigetszentmiklós, near Budapest, before the pizzas pass through a liquid-nitrogen freezing tunnel.

Cryogenic freezing produces smaller ice crystals than conventional methods, which the company says helps preserve the open crumb structure and topping texture through the freeze-thaw cycle. From frozen, the pizzas require approximately 2 to 2.5 minutes in an oven preheated to 250–350°C to complete cooking.

The UK push is timed to a sector where labour costs and recruitment are pressing concerns. In the British Chambers of Commerce's first-quarter 2026 survey, 85% of hospitality respondents identified labour costs as a pressure. CV-Library recorded 40,395 chef job adverts between April and June 2026, up 83.4% year on year according to the Craft Guild of Chefs.

Co-founder and chief executive Josep Zara frames the product around removing technical complexity from the restaurant kitchen:

"We wanted to take the most difficult and unpredictable part of the process out of the restaurant and move it into a controlled environment. If the fermentation, stretching, ingredients and first bake can be controlled centrally, the restaurant team can concentrate on service instead of reproducing an entire specialist production process during every shift."

The target customer is hotels, restaurants, pubs and catering operations that want to serve Neapolitan-style pizza without requiring a specialist on every shift. One application the company has identified is late-night hotel food service, where the short finish time allows a hot meal to be prepared after the main kitchen team has stood down.

The facility has an initial rated capacity of 27,000 pizzas a day and was designed with scope to reach 100,000. Despite that headroom, hand-stretching has been retained at both volumes. Zara says the decision is structural rather than cosmetic:

"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."

The facility represents an investment of approximately 1.5 billion Hungarian forints. Madre is currently available in Hungary, and DoughLAB plans to supply UK hospitality businesses through distributors and wholesalers alongside direct retail agreements.