Amateur cooks and professional chefs alike will be firing up their best pizza recipes next month for a brand-new Napa Valley tradition. The Napa Valley Education Foundation is hosting its inaugural Napa Valley Pizza Contest on Sunday, Sept. 27, from 3 to 6 PM at the NVEF Discovery Campus, 530 Third St. in Napa, with $50 admission that includes pizza tastings and a chance to crown the valley's next pizza champion.
According to the Napa Valley Register, the contest brings together professional chefs, local restaurants, and amateur pizza makers, all competing for the title of Napa Valley Pizza Champion. Competitors can enter their own pizza styles, ranging from traditional recipes to unconventional creations, and community members are also invited to nominate contestants. Applications and nominations are available at nvef.org/pizza, per the same report.
Attendees will get to sample entries and vote for their favorites, with proceeds supporting the Napa Valley Education Foundation's broader mission. Executive Director Jennifer Stewart said the event brings together creativity, community and commitment to young people, adding that ticket purchases and pizza slices will help students explore careers, develop practical skills and discover future paths, the Register reports.
A Wood-Fired Gift for Culinary Students
The contest's presenting partner, Forno Piombo, will donate a wood-fired pizza oven to the NVEF Discovery Campus, where it will be used for culinary education and career exploration. The company will also raffle off a second pizza oven during the event, with proceeds raising funds for NVEF's career readiness and culinary programs, according to the Register's report.
Tony Piombo said Forno Piombo is excited to bring its community spirit to the first Napa Valley Pizza Contest. The family-owned business was founded in 2014 by Guy and Tony Piombo after they built a single pizza oven for a local church, and it has since grown into a 20,000-square-foot manufacturing operation straddling the Napa and American Canyon border, according to Canyon News. The company's hand-built brick dome ovens reach internal cooking temperatures up to 950 degrees Fahrenheit, capable of cooking a Neapolitan-style pizza in as little as 90 seconds while holding residual heat for up to 36 hours, per Forno Piombo's own materials.
From Boarding School to Community Hub
The Discovery Campus itself has a distinct backstory. The riverside property was gifted to the Napa Valley Education Foundation in May 2025 by The Oxbow School, an arts-focused private boarding school founded in 1998 by Robert Mondavi, Margrit Mondavi, and Ann Hatch that closed in 2024, as the Wine Business reported at the time. The transfer handed NVEF a fully equipped campus complete with studios, dorms, and dining facilities, allowing the foundation to expand well beyond traditional fundraising.
Since acquiring the site, NVEF has introduced a catalog of more than 40 low-cost youth and adult community classes per term covering culinary arts, STEM, music, and media, with sliding-scale fees and scholarships available for local families, according to the Napa Valley Education Foundation. This summer, the foundation also launched Discovery Campus After Hours, a community event series offering free riverside film screenings and live performances along the lawn adjoining the Napa River.
A Growing Foundation Behind the Ovens
Established in 1983 at the request of the district superintendent, the Napa Valley Education Foundation now raises nearly $2 million annually to fill public funding gaps, supporting more than 20,000 youth and 1,000 educators across Napa County. Those programs supplement the Napa Valley Unified School District, which serves over 16,000 K-12 students across 26 public schools, according to Ballotpedia data cited by the foundation.
Stewart has led NVEF since 2014 and received the Heart of Napa Excellence in Leadership Award in 2024 after overseeing a quadrupling of the organization's budget and staffing. The pizza contest marks the latest expansion of programming at the Discovery Campus, which already enables students to explore culinary arts, media, music, art and STEM, and supports Napa Valley students' career exploration and hands-on learning more broadly.
Part of a Busier Campus Calendar
The pizza contest joins a growing list of community gatherings NVEF has hosted or supported at the site this year. In August, local theater group Valley Players staged its An Evening of Shorts play festival at the Discovery Campus, using both its indoor and outdoor spaces for public performances. That same month, NVEF partnered with Nimbus Arts to co-organize the Young Creators Gallery at the Napa Town & Country Fair, an interactive youth art exhibit that replaced traditional static displays.
Together, those events illustrate how the former boarding school campus has become a public gathering point since the foundation took ownership. With the pizza contest, NVEF is betting that a shared love of wood-fired crusts can do the same work as a play festival or an art gallery: pulling Napa Valley residents onto the Discovery Campus lawn and, in the process, funding the next generation of the county's culinary and career programs.
