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
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. Half a million public dollars moved from a Southwest Florida tax base to a private equity portfolio company in Georgia, and the only local businesses that might have competed for a piece of it 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
The School District of Lee County cut 457 positions, 275 of them teachers, to close a $92 million gap. Teachers in this county are reporting classes of 28 to 30 students against a legal cap of 22. And on the same night, in the same room, this board committed up to half a million dollars to an out-of-state vendor that no other company was permitted to bid against, while one member could not get an email answered in six days.
Those dollars sit in different funds. We will say that plainly, because it is true. But they sit in the same year, in the same building, approved by the same seven people, and the standard of proof applied to a pizza pilot was visibly lower than the standard applied to a sixth-grade reading position.
It's not my job to pick what pizza we eat. It's about the budget. That is our job.
Board Member Melisa Giovannelli
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.
Fact check
Every quotation and the vote tally come from the district's own recording. The strongest claim in the piece, that no local vendor was given a chance to compete, follows from the single source designation itself and is not disputed by anyone at the table.
This is an opinion piece and it argues a side. The facts underneath it still have to hold, so here they are with their limits attached. This piece does not allege that anyone broke a law or a procurement rule. Single source purchasing is lawful and routine; the argument here is that it was the wrong instrument for this purchase, not that it was an improper one.
Checked The School District of Lee County's own recording of the August 3, 2026 Action Meeting, transcribed on-device and reviewed against timestamps; the district's Notice of Intended Decision to Enter a Single Source Contract for Smart Mouth Pizza, posted to its procurement services page July 17, 2026; the FY 2026-2027 tentative budget; published results of the Galbani Professionale Pizza Cup at the Pizza Tomorrow Summit in Orlando, the Washington Post's state-by-state pizza rankings, and the 2026 Pizza Expo in Las Vegas; and an OpenStreetMap query of pizzerias operating inside a Lee County bounding box.
The board voted 6-1 to approve up to $500,000 for Smart Mouth Pizza from Bull's Eye Brands, Inc. of Atlanta, Georgia, for four high schools, August 3, 2026 through June 30, 2027.
Roll call on the district's recording: Fisher aye, Giovannelli nay, Ribble aye, Jordan aye, Langford Fleming aye, Chaviano aye, Persons aye. The remainder of the consent agenda passed 7-0 after Giovannelli pulled item Q.1. The superintendent read the vendor, the amount and the term into the record. The authorization is for up to $500,000, not a guaranteed spend of $500,000, and the piece says up to.
This money could have gone to teachers instead.
It could not, and this piece does not say it could. Food and nutrition services is a self-sustaining fund. Board Member Vanessa Chaviano said at the tentative budget meeting the same afternoon that the food comes out of special revenue and the general fund is where teacher pay comes from, so the buckets cannot be crossed. The superintendent said the same thing at the table, and the board chair said it a third time about the capital transfer. The piece places two facts in the same budget year without asserting a causal link between them, and states the limitation openly.
The district is buying equipment it has no plan to maintain.
An earlier version of our own reporting raised this and it was wrong. The superintendent addressed it directly on the record: there are no upfront costs, the vendor-provided equipment requires no upfront capital expenditure, equipment costs are amortized and paid off over time through regular food purchases, the pilot schools will primarily use their existing ovens, and if the program does not meet expectations within six months the vendor removes the equipment at no penalty or ongoing cost to the district.
The pizza costs students more.
Board Member Vanessa Chaviano put the difference at about 17 cents per pizza, roughly $1.03 to $1.20. A student's first entree pizza is covered under the free lunch program; only additional pizza carries a charge. The superintendent described the product as low in sodium, containing no trans fats, and using top quality meats without fillers.
The item passed without any board scrutiny.
The board held a workshop on the item and members had one-on-one briefings. Board Member Samuel Fisher noted on the record that he asked questions in both, and pressed the superintendent at the table on food waste. The criticism in this piece is narrower: that no outside vendor was made to compete, and that the one member who submitted written questions six days ahead did not receive answers before the vote.
Bull's Eye Brands is owned by a private equity firm.
AFM Capital Partners Inc announced its investment in Bull's Eye Brands, Inc. d/b/a Smart Mouth Pizza on January 6, 2025, describing itself as an operationally driven private investment firm specializing in control investments in middle market companies. Tom Willingham is Smart Mouth's chief executive, Seth Salzman its president, and Mark McTigue is AFM's president and founding partner. Private equity ownership is lawful and ordinary and this piece does not suggest otherwise. It is stated because the destination of public money is a fact readers are entitled to weigh.
Lee County is the first Florida district to sole source this program.
It is not. Brevard Public Schools posted an intent to single or sole source the Smart Mouth Pizza Program from Bull's Eye Brands under solicitation 26-0556-SS-MC, with a December 18, 2025 due date, roughly seven months before Lee posted its own notice. Arlington ISD in Texas began the program at four schools and has said it expects to expand to all secondary campuses. The four school pilot structure is the vendor's standard entry model rather than a design particular to Lee County.
Anyone connected to Bull's Eye Brands, Smart Mouth or AFM Capital gave money to a Lee County School Board candidate.
We looked and found nothing. Parents for Transparency checked every contribution and expenditure in its own database against Bull's Eye Brands, Smart Mouth, AFM Capital Partners, Tom Willingham, Seth Salzman and Mark McTigue. There are no matches. A single surname hit in the contribution data belongs to an unrelated person in another part of the state and is not connected to this company in any way. We publish this because the absence of a connection is a finding, and because a rumor of one would be easy to start and hard to stop.
More than forty pizzerias operate in Lee County.
An OpenStreetMap query of a Lee County bounding box returns 44 locations under 30 distinct names, 16 of them chain outlets. Open mapping data undercounts restaurants, so this is a floor rather than a census, and the piece says more than forty rather than a precise figure.
Teachers are reporting classes of 28 to 30 students against a cap of 22.
The 22-student cap for grades 4 through 8 is set by Fla. Stat. 1003.03. The 28 to 30 figure is a Lee County teacher's account of her own roster, not a district-published number. Since 2013, schools designated public schools of choice may be measured on a schoolwide average rather than class by class, which is one way an over-cap roster can coexist with a district in compliance.
PFT's public comment that night caused the item to be pulled.
We are not claiming that and neither should anyone else. Parents for Transparency delivered a public comment on class size immediately before the consent agenda was taken up, and Giovannelli pulled item Q.1 minutes later. Giovannelli stated on the record that she had decided to pull the item the previous Friday, under a board rule requiring that decision by Friday. No board member stated a reason connected to public comment.