Drone Pizza Deliveries and Outer Space Restaurants

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June 17, 2025

Drone Pizza Deliveries and Outer Space Restaurants

Jim Nicopoulos is a long-time Polyface patron and restaurant owner with some big ideas. He is never afraid to try something new. He bought Primo Family Restaurant in 2007 and he hasn’t stood still since. Primo is located in Alexandria Virginia and if you are ever in that neck of the woods, be sure to look them up!

Jim's daughter Tania is now the Food and Beverage Manager at Primo. While attending the Culinary Institute of America (CIA) in New York, she wrote a paper about Polyface Farm. That’s why Primo began using Polyface beef, chicken and pork in numerous menu items. It was a big idea because the 100% grassfed beef was challenging to work with due to the low fat content. But they stuck with it, experimented, and developed new techniques.

Jim has been in restaurant life since he was born in Washington, DC. His father was a waiter at that time. Jim’s parents met in Greece when his father bought a winning lottery ticket at the Greek Orthodox Church for a free trip to Greece. The Washington Post carried a story about it in the 1950s. He went to Greece and came home with a bride.

His father’s restaurant had an event hall, a dining room, and a bar. Jim learned from his father and through trial and error. The more punishing the error, the better he learned. He could make minor errors repeatedly until they interfered with the profit margin. Then he had to make changes. The kitchen, the bar, and the dining room were the classroom.

Jim describes the transition from owning a 90-foot bar next to the White House to owning a family restaurant in the suburbs as “going from Sodom and Gomorrah to monastery”. The culture is completely different.

When asked what’s in the future, Jim, ever a visionary, dreams big again: a restaurant on the space station. “I’d ask Mr. Bezos to give me transport. It would be two tables of two. You would sit by a window. It takes an hour and a half to go around the planet at 20,000 miles an hour. Every time you saw a continent the menu would change. Food indigenous to that continent would be served. It would be a 2, 3 or 4 hour event, circle the globe twice, have a beautiful experience, then fly back”. He says he'd "hire chefs from all over the world to staff a rotating squad in space to serve them, and I’d love to greet them and be their host. What a way to impress your girlfriend! Imagine having Polyface proteins served on a space station!"

In the future Jim predicts that people will use AI to eat. Finding a restaurant like Primo will be rare and expensive. “McDonalds already opened the first non-human restaurant in Texas. Nobody works there. This is the most innovative, highest R&D resource national chain on the planet. That means this is what’s coming. Walmart started drone delivery this month in Arkansas and Texas.” Who knows, one day Primo might give it a try. Just another big idea for Jim Nicopoulos. It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a pizza drone!

We appreaciate Jim's imagination, as he creates ideas and illustrates possibilities - ever experimenting and developing ways to keep up with these mind-bending times! And we appreciate their restaurant's patronage through the years!

All Related

Happy Thanksgiving, Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year--that's a lot of stuff going on kind of lumped together. Which brings me to my thought this month: it's all related. Perhaps the signature difference between Polyface and current mainline food thinking is integration versus segregation. I could use numerous words to describe this basic concept, like parts versus wholes, but I think these two are as good as any. Conventional industrial food systems break things apart. We see it on farms that grow only one or two things, without regard for the greater inter-relatedness of ecology, all the way up to packaged and processed food. Modern processed foods don't use whole ingredients; they use pieces of things. They strip out the germ of the wheat, for example. They refine things to the point that the food bears no resemblance to its natural state. Then they put all these pieces together and call it food. But these pieces came from widely divergent places, and the beautiful unprocessed original no longer exists. When Dad and I were brainstorming what to call this farm venture that would eventually become Polyface, Dad's assumption was that we'd call it Salatin Inc.--you know, like Ford Motor Company or Chrysler (named for Walter P. Chrysler, the founder). I was adamant that it NOT be our family name for two reasons. First, I suggested there may be a day when a Salatin isn't at the helm. Secondly, I wanted the name to recognize integrated thinking. I came up with the name "Interface Inc." to recognize the three great environments: water, land, and forest. For 20 years, during what I call our experimental homesteading days, we'd been planting trees, fencing out riparian zones, fencing out the forest to protect it from cows, and developing a landscape plan with these various zones in mind. The State Corporation Commission rejected the name because, unbeknownst to us, Virginia already had an "Interface Inc." It was a labor arbitration company to work out disagreements between labor and management. I was milking the cow when Dad told me the bad news, and I spontaneously blurted: "If we can't be Interface, let's be Polyface--the farm of many faces." Dad laughed, but we both liked the idea, and it stuck and was approved. The point here is that from the outset, all our thinking was about how to leverage the various assets of the diversified ecosystem and then harness the distinctives of the various animals. As a result, we looked at symbiotic natural patterns and have done our best to duplicate them. The Eggmobile follows the cows so the chickens can scratch through cow pies. We use pigs to aerate compost. Our small flock of sheep is like a glorified weed eater, cleaning up fence lines and around farm buildings to reduce mowing. The animals move through the pastures, paddock to paddock; they don't stay in the same place. Illustrative of "conventional-think", Virginia Tech veterinary professors who judged my son Daniel's 4-H talk titled "Symbiosis and Synergy in the Racken (Rabbit-Chicken) House" at the state contest nearly 30 years ago couldn't restrain their skepticism. "Aren't you concerned about diseases with two species that close to each other?" I was never so proud. He was about 15 and, without batting an eye, looked those professors in the eye and replied: "We've learned that most pathogens don't cross-speciate." Folks, I had not prepped him for that question. When he responded like that, those three professors slapped their legs and laughed at the audacious notion. They had no further comments and immediately tried to recruit him to enroll at Virginia Tech and major in Veterinary Science. Instead, he stayed with me on the farm and scaled up these simple integrated relationships to the thousands of animals we have now--with virtually no vet bills. Meanwhile, conventional experts wring their hands over bird flu, screw worm, African swine fever, blackleg, and a host of maladies that attack places where an integrated approach toward biology is severely lacking. Pediatrician Dr. Sharon Goldfield, director of population health for the Murdoch Children's Research Institute, wrote a fascinating op-ed in the Wall Street Journal last week titled "Baby Food and Youth Obesity." She slammed "packaged baby and toddler foods" because they fail even rudimentary nutrition standards. Their surveys indicated that "80 percent of children are eating packaged toddler foods, many of which are ultra-processed, from an early age, with 43 percent of them eating these foods at least five days a week." Kids are eating out of boxes and slurping from concoctions created by a segregated mentality from field to stomach. This segregated thinking even permeates parental decision making, divorcing overall health from food and assuming whatever happens, pharmaceuticals can fix it. At Polyface, everything we do assumes that everything we do affects something else we do. It's that simple. Both land health and people health occur when we realize everything relates to everything. You can't just eat well and not exercise. You can't dismiss the value of sunlight on your skin; especially early morning sunlight. Hydration. Sleep. Stress. Forgiveness. Gratitude. It's all part of us. As we celebrate all these holiday times and imagine the relatedness of Thanksgiving with the Christmas story with the eagerness of a new year, imagine all the things going on in your life and how they work together. Or how if you pull them apart, things fray. Be assured that here at Polyface we're trying to integrate ecology, people, and economy in an overall symbiotic whole to deliver you the best food at a reasonable price. And we thank you for helping us build an integrated whole that respects earthworms all the way to our dinner plate and microbiome. We're not feeding you earthworms, but be assured they play an ongoing role in every bite you enjoy from Polyface. Thank you. Joel