Lee County Makes the Best Pizza in America. Our School District Bought Its Pizza From Atlanta.

On August 3 the school board voted 6-1 to spend up to $500,000 on pizza from a single source vendor in Atlanta, owned since January 2025 by a private equity firm, with no competitive bid, in the county that just produced the first and second best pizza makers in America. One board member pulled it off the consent agenda, said she asked for a financial analysis and never received one, and cast the only vote against it. Our fact-check rides at the bottom.

By Amber Cebull · August 3, 2026

Update, August 4, 2026

Last November in Orlando, first and second place in the two-person championship at the Galbani Professionale Pizza Cup went to two shops from the same city. First: Enrico Aguila and his son Antonio of Uncle Rico's Pizza, with a Lomo Saltado pie honoring their Peruvian heritage. Second: Mike Denunzio and Haley Dalton of Fine Folk Pizza. Both in Fort Myers.

Aguila also took Best Cheese Pizza with the only perfect score of the competition and was named Best in Show. The Washington Post ranks Uncle Rico's the third-best New York-style pizza in Florida. At the 2026 Pizza Expo in Las Vegas he placed third in the Southeast, against more than 750 pizza makers, for the second year running.

On Monday night, the School Board of Lee County voted 6 to 1 to spend up to $500,000 on pizza from Bull's Eye Brands, Incorporated, of Atlanta, Georgia. There was no competitive bid.

Superintendent Denise Carlin read the item into the record: approval of the expenditure for the purchase of Smart Mouth Pizza from single source provider Bull's Eye Brands Incorporated in Atlanta, Georgia, for $500,000, for the period of August 3rd, 2026 through June 30th, 2027. Four high schools. One vendor. Nobody else invited.

More than forty pizzerias operate in Lee County. None of them was asked what it could do.

It is not only the pizzerias

Board Member Debbie Jordan, who has worked in the industry, watched the vendor's own training video before the meeting and explained what the contract actually requires.

Every product for this pizza must come from the same vendor. So the pepperoni, the cheese, the sauce, the dough. All of that comes from the same. That's where the money is going.

Board Member Debbie Jordan, August 3, 2026

One purchase order in Atlanta replaces every ingredient line a local supplier might have competed for.

Who actually owns the pizza

For twenty nine years, Bull's Eye Brands was what its own materials describe as a family food service business, three generations deep, which built the Smart Mouth program in 2001 for school food service directors in the Southeast. That is a real company with a real history, and none of what follows is a knock on the people who built it.

They sold it. In January 2025, Bull's Eye Brands was acquired by AFM Capital Partners, a private investment firm that takes control positions in middle market companies. Smart Mouth is now a private equity portfolio company. What the School District of Lee County bought from in August 2026 is not the family business. It is what came after the family business.

Now consider who did not get asked. Enrico Aguila and his son Antonio own Uncle Rico's. Mike Denunzio and Haley Dalton own Fine Folk. Between them they took first and second at a national championship, and one of them holds the only perfect score the judges gave. They are small businesses in this county with their owners' names on the door and their payroll in this tax base.

The district did not weigh them and reject them. It never asked. Whatever the district spends under this contract, up to half a million dollars of it, goes to a private equity portfolio company in Georgia rather than to anyone who might have bid for it here, and the local businesses that might have competed found out the way you did.

Lee is not the first

Seven months before Lee posted its notice, Brevard Public Schools ran the same play: an intent to sole source the Smart Mouth Pizza Program from Bull's Eye Brands, solicitation 26-0556-SS-MC. In Arlington, Texas, the district started Smart Mouth at four schools and expects to expand it to every secondary campus.

Four schools is not a number Lee County arrived at. It is the vendor's standard way in, and districtwide is the destination. Which is worth holding next to the fact that the one board member who asked whether the thing was sustainable was told nothing before she had to vote.

The member who pulled it could not get an email answered

Board Member Melisa Giovannelli pulled the item from the consent agenda, where it had been filed to pass without discussion, and cast the only vote against it. She called it a luxury item rather than a critical need, and questioned whether it was fiscally responsible or sustainable in the long term. She had asked for a financial analysis and never got one.

There was no data to support this. And I asked for that information and did not receive it.

Board Member Melisa Giovannelli

Her account of how that went is worth reading slowly. She sent her questions the previous Tuesday. Board rules required her to decide whether to pull the item by Friday. The answers, she was told, went into the weekly update, which arrives on Friday, the same day. She sent more questions the morning of the vote and got none back before she had to vote.

All I needed was an email back with answers. That would have solved a lot of this.

Board Member Melisa Giovannelli

The board approved it anyway. Board Member William Ribble, voting yes, described the process plainly.

We had a workshop. It makes a lot of sense. We all kind of liked the presentation they did, and we didn't drill them on any of these questions, because they were really driving the point home that it was fresh food.

Board Member William Ribble

We did not drill them on any of these questions. That is the sentence.

What the district answered, fairly

To be fair to the district, and we intend to be: this money cannot become a teacher salary. Food and nutrition services is a self-sustaining fund, as the superintendent said at the table. The price difference is about 17 cents a pizza. The vendor supplies the equipment at no upfront cost, amortized through food purchases, and removes it at no penalty if the pilot fails within six months. A student's first pizza is covered by the free lunch program. Those are real answers and they were given on the record.

They are also answers to questions nobody was made to compete over.

The year this happened in

None of this is a claim that pizza money could have been teacher money. It could not, and the district is right to say so. The question is narrower and it is about process. A purchase ceiling of up to half a million dollars went to a single out-of-state vendor that no other company was permitted to bid against, in a district that had just spent months telling this community there was nothing left to cut, and the one member who asked for the analysis behind it could not get an email answered in six days.

The dollars sit in different funds and they are not interchangeable. What is comparable is the standard of proof. A board that has spent this year telling teachers and parents that every position had to be justified approved a half-million-dollar purchase ceiling, from a vendor nobody competed against, without the written analysis one of its own members asked for twice.

It's not my job to pick what pizza we eat. It's about the budget. That is our job.

Board Member Melisa Giovannelli

Armor Persons commented, so we took a deeper dive

One housekeeping note before I get into it. I listened to the August 3 meeting from my car, on my way to rehearsal, which is how a fair number of parents in this county keep up with a board that meets at six o'clock on a Monday evening. I wrote this piece the same night. If I got a detail wrong in the rush, I would rather fix it in public than leave it sitting there, and I said exactly that when Chairman Persons responded.

Here is the part he is right about, and I am not going to bury it. This contract is not new spending. The district was already buying pizza. The vote replaced a frozen product with a fresh one from a different supplier at about 17 cents more per serving, and it did not raise the tentative budget by a penny. I put the $500,000 next to this year's 457 position cuts without making that distinction clear enough, and a reader could reasonably have come away believing half a million dollars of discretionary money was spent on pizza while teachers were being cut. That is not what happened, and those passages have been rewritten.

So I fixed it. Then I did the reading.

The chair told the public this was a fresher, healthier meal with fewer preservatives. The superintendent had told the board the pizza is low in sodium, contains no trans fats, and utilizes top quality meats without fillers. Nobody at that table asked to see a label before voting. So we went and found one.

Everything below is pulled directly from Bull's Eye Brands' own website. Here is what is on it.

The seventeen cents is the district's cost, not the student's price

The chair's defense leans on a number: the fresh pizza costs just 17 cents more per serving. That figure is real. Board Member Vanessa Chaviano gave it at the table, precisely: a 17 cent difference, from $1.03 for the frozen pizza to $1.20.

What neither of them mentioned is what happens to that pizza next. Smart Mouth's own published FAQ says most schools charge between $2.75 and $3.75 for an individual pizza. So the district pays $1.20 and the additional pizza sells to a teenager for somewhere between two and three times that, a gross margin of roughly $1.55 to $2.55 on every one sold beyond the free entree.

Seventeen cents is the cost. It is not the price. The chair quoted the number that makes the vote sound small and left out the number that explains why a company wanted the contract.

The ceiling is worth the same arithmetic. Up to $500,000 at $1.20 a pizza is roughly 416,000 pizzas. Spread across the four schools and the approximately 5,000 students the chair says the pilot serves, that is about 83 pizzas per student in one school year. Either the authorization is set far above anything the district expects to spend, or the plan assumes a great many second pizzas. No projection was given to the board either way, which is what Board Member Giovannelli was asking for when she was told to move on.

On low in sodium

The federal government does not leave that phrase open to interpretation. Under FDA rules, low sodium means 140 milligrams or less per serving. The company's sheet lists ten pizzas. Every one of them is between 570 and 870 milligrams. The cheese pizza, the lowest on the page, carries four times the FDA threshold. The Italian sausage and Hawaiian pizzas carry 870, which is more than six times it.

Even the veggie pizza is 710 milligrams.

Put it against the school standard instead and it does not improve. USDA caps lunch sodium for grades 9 through 12 at a weekly average under 1,280 milligrams. The Italian sausage pizza alone is 870 of them, roughly 68 percent of a high school student's entire lunch sodium allowance in a single entree, before the tray holds milk or a side.

Now recall where the revenue comes from. The free meal covers one pizza; the money is in the second. Two Italian sausage pizzas is 1,740 milligrams, which is 36 percent over a high school student's entire daily lunch sodium limit, from two items. The business model and the nutrition standard point in opposite directions, and the more successful the program is, the further apart they get.

The ingredients they do not publish

There is a second problem with that sheet. The ingredient statement on it covers four things: the crust, the sauce, the cheese and the pepperoni. The recipes printed beside the nutrition panels call for more than that. The Italian sausage pizza takes an ounce of Italian sausage. The Hotwing takes diced chicken and Franks hot sauce. The Hawaiian takes diced ham and pineapple.

None of those have a published ingredient list anywhere on the company's website. Half the menu contains meat whose contents the vendor does not disclose to the public, and this district agreed to buy from that vendor exclusively, without competition, for up to half a million dollars.

On fewer preservatives and no trans fats

The pepperoni's published ingredient list includes BHA, BHT and sodium nitrite. It also names partially hydrogenated soybean oil, which is the food industry's source of artificial trans fat, on a label whose panel declares zero grams of it. Both can be true at once, because FDA labeling rules permit anything under half a gram per serving to be rounded to zero.

The oils

Read the fats on that ingredient list in order. The crust is made with canola oil and vegetable shortening. The sauce is made with soybean oil. The pepperoni seasoning is made with partially hydrogenated soybean oil. Four separate industrial seed oils in one personal pizza, in a product this district is presenting to parents as the fresh, healthy alternative to what it was serving before.

One of those is not a matter of opinion. Partially hydrogenated oil is the food industry's source of artificial trans fat, and the FDA revoked its status as generally recognized as safe in 2015 and ordered it out of the American food supply, because artificial trans fat causes heart disease. That is settled, and it is the federal government's own finding, not ours.

The rest is genuinely contested, and we are going to be straight about where the line is. Seed oils are the subject of active research and loud argument. A 2024 study in the journal Gut, out of the University of South Florida, found pro-inflammatory lipids derived from omega-6 fatty acids concentrated in colon tumors, and it landed in the middle of a real and frightening trend of colorectal cancer appearing in younger and younger people. That study did not test seed oils, did not measure anyone's diet, and other researchers have pushed back hard on the leap from one to the other. Anyone telling you the science is settled in either direction is selling something.

Which is the entire reason a parent is entitled to the label. Families in this county are making decisions about seed oils at their own kitchen tables right now, on the same incomplete science everyone else has. Some of them will decide it does not matter. Some will decide it matters a great deal. Both of those parents are paying for this contract, and neither can see what is in it, because the district bought from one company without competition and never asked for a current ingredient statement.

Then there is the phrase top quality meats without fillers. Read the meat line in full. The pepperoni is pork and beef, salt, and then dextrose, sodium ascorbate, smoke flavor, citric acid, spice extractive, partially hydrogenated soybean oil, natural smoke flavoring, lactic acid starter culture, oleoresin of paprika, sodium nitrite, BHA and BHT. No soy protein, starch or milk solid appears, which is what a meat processor means by a binder. What does appear is added sugar, two synthetic preservatives, a curing salt and a partially hydrogenated oil. Without fillers is a claim about one narrow category of additive, made about an ingredient line carrying a dozen of them.

Why this is the district's problem and not the vendor's

That document is seven years old. Partially hydrogenated oils were ordered out of the American food supply after it was written, so the recipe served in a Lee County cafeteria this month may well be different, and we are not claiming to know what is in the pizza today. We would simply like it not to be the ingredient list the company is still publishing.

That is exactly the point. Nobody on this board knows either. Not one member asked for a current nutrition label or an ingredient statement before approving up to half a million dollars for a company nobody was allowed to compete against. The superintendent's health claims were accepted at the table, repeated to the public by the chair, and the only documentation the vendor makes public contradicts two of them.

A parent found this in about ten minutes, after a Facebook comment sent them looking. The board had a workshop, one-on-one briefings, and a vote.

What we went looking for after the chair's post

Every board member who defended this vote said a version of the same thing: the meal is free to students, so nothing is being taken from anyone. That is true of the first pizza. It is not where the money is.

Smart Mouth's own published FAQ puts the second pizza in plain type. Most schools, it says, charge between $2.75 and $3.75 for an individual pizza. The federal meal program covers a student's entree. The additional pizza is the sale. That is the revenue, and it comes out of a teenager's pocket.

The company does not hide what the program is for. Its materials describe Smart Mouth as a way to increase profit within high schools by feeding more kids, and to make school lunch programs more profitable by increasing student dining frequency. Dining frequency is a phrase that means selling a child a second lunch.

The same FAQ lays out two ways a district can pay for the equipment. Buy it outright, and the school gets what the company calls maximized profit from day one with each pizza sold. Finance it instead, and the school takes lower per pizza profit during the first year. Lee County took the second one. The superintendent presented it to the board as a benefit, that there were no upfront costs and the equipment is amortized through food purchases. By the vendor's own description, that is the option that earns the district less.

So the arrangement the board approved 6 to 1 is this. A private equity owned company in Atlanta installs its equipment at four Lee County high schools at no upfront cost, recovers that cost through the district's food orders, and the program pays for itself to the extent that students buy a second pizza at around three to four dollars on top of the lunch they already receive for free. Nobody at that table was given a projection of how many students would do that.

Board Member Melisa Giovannelli asked for exactly that projection and did not get it. Her words at the table: we do not even know if the kids are going to purchase this for additional cost and what the waste is going to be. We do not have any projection or an analysis.

The district did not solve a food problem here. It signed a revenue plan, without competition, and called it a pilot.

Three requests

• Publish the single-source determination, the written justification explaining why no other vendor in the United States, let alone Southwest Florida, could meet this specification.
• Publish the questions Giovannelli sent and the answers she did not receive. A board member cannot exercise oversight on a Friday deadline with Friday answers.
• Publish the pilot's success criteria before the pilot runs, not after. Giovannelli noted the district already discards more than half of the food it serves. If the measure of success is decided afterward, it is not a measure.
• Publish the vendor's ingredient sourcing. The superintendent told this board the pizza uses top quality meats without fillers. Every component of it, the dough, the sauce, the cheese and the pepperoni, comes from one company in Georgia. Where is that food grown and processed, what are the company's sourcing standards, and is any of it Florida grown? Florida is one of the largest tomato producers in the country. A district telling parents this is the healthier choice should be able to answer that in writing.

And to every pizzeria and food supplier in Lee County: the School District of Lee County decided there was one source for pizza, and it is in Atlanta. We would like to know what you think about that. Tell us, and we will publish it.

All op-eds from the community