Dear Mr. Berko: I’m 42 and a conservative, long-term investor. Since 2002, I have carefully built up a portfolio of 22 growth stocks, worth $140,000. I am thinking of taking a risk and buying 200 shares of Papa Murphy’s, a take-and-bake pizza company. What do you think of this stock as an investment?
— DP, Detroit
Dear DP: I once thought that the greatest invention in the world was the wheel, until I had my first pizza. Then I realized the world’s greatest invention was beer. A wheel just doesn’t go so well with pizza as beer,.
There are about 80,000 pizza joints in the U.S. — including Domino’s, Little Caesars, Pizza Hut and Papa John’s — that deliver to your home, your office or your pied-a-terre if you’re working late. However, this 80,000 number does not include Puerto Rico, American Samoa, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Wake Island, Jarvis Island or the Northern Mariana Islands, where I believe there are some really execrable pizza joints.
Now, I’ve had gustable pizzas in Wikieup, Ariz., and Umatilla, Fla., but I’ve seldom been more gruntled after tasting Papa Murphy’s (FRSH-$10) pizza when I was in Colorado Springs, Colo. FRSH is involved in the better pizza movement. It offers vegan dough and sauces, and then you also can pick your toppings — including butcher-quality meats and fresh, hand-sliced veggies (not the frozen packaged stuff used by most others) — and cheeses made from grade A pasteurized milk. After the folks there construct it, you take it home and bake it in your oven or pop it in the freezer until the next Detroit Lions or Red Wings game on TV.