Akshita Goyal, from Lucknow, is a communication design graduate. She worked five years as a graphics designer at Gartner in Gurugram, then returned to Lucknow in July 2025 to help the family business and build her own identity.
She spotted a gap between premium restaurant-style Neapolitan pizza and ordinary street pizza. She started work in November 2025 and launched NAPO in April 2026 with Rs 12 lakh of savings: a 12 by 7 feet custom-built live open-kitchen trailer at Sushant Golf City, Lucknow, selling affordable Italian Neapolitan-style pizza.
The first month brought a Rs 1.5 lakh loss. Customers compared the pizza dough to naan and sabzi. She worked about three months with her first chef to fix the product, running over 50 trials for the red sauce alone. The standard operating procedure now is SwissBake 00 flour, 36 to 48 hour slow fermentation, hand-shaped dough, and a wood-fired oven above 400 degrees Celsius. Local micro-influencers gave the trailer wide popularity in June 2026.
From loss to profit
The menu has six veg and two non-veg pizzas, along with pasta, chicken wings and in-house tiramisu jars. Prices run from Rs 390 to Rs 520, with an average order value of Rs 500 to 600.
May 2026 brought revenue of Rs 1.3 lakh and a net profit of Rs 30,000. By September 2026, revenue had reached Rs 5.6 lakh, with a net profit of about Rs 2.3 lakh.
The numbers
More than 3,500 pizzas have been sold in six months, an average of about 900 a month. Peak daily sales run to Rs 30,000 to 40,000. NAPO is listed on Swiggy and Zomato, but the focus stays on the on-ground experience.
The road has not been smooth. The chef quit suddenly, there was billing fraud, and there were problems with Google reviews.
Her target now is to make NAPO an established name in Lucknow pizza culture, and Neapolitan pizza an everyday street food rather than an occasion food.
