The Pizza Witch

There’s magic in the air at Market Pizza, where Megan Jones-Holt casts spells of deliciousness with wild-game pies topped with venison, kangaroo and camel meat.

BY RICK HYNUM

There’s a witch running wild in Stockton, New Jersey, but don’t be afraid. Megan Jones-Holt, owner of Market Pizza, is one of the good witches, a fun-loving, pizza making Sabrina or Samantha who doesn’t have to wiggle her nose to conjure up magic in the kitchen.

Known affectionately around New Jersey as the “Pizza Witch,” Jones-Holt started casting spells of deliciousness in 2017, when she and her husband, Matt, bought Market Pizza— situated in a farmers market called Stockton Market—and quickly garnered attention for her artisanal specialty pies topped with wild-game meat like venison, boar and even kangaroo. And her annual fundraising partnership with a New Jersey nonprofit, Hunters Helping the Hungry (HHH), has elevated her profile as a gifted pizzaiola with a passion for feeding people in need, not to mention a knack for marketing her business in a crowded and competitive field.

Wild Things

That “Pizza Witch” moniker alone is a marketing doozy—and she came by it honestly. “A former manager of the Stockton Market used to be my tester for the weekly specialty pizzas,” Jones-Holt recalls. “One Friday afternoon, I gave her a slice—I don’t recall which pizza it was—and she looked at me and said, ‘You’re a witch,’ a reference to how good the pizza creations were. I just took it and ran with it from that day on.”

Folks in Stockton have been equally mesmerized by JonesHolt’s pizzas. She and her husband previously owned an event rentals company and had no pizzeria experience, but the New Orleans native had been fine-tuning her culinary wizardry at home all her life. Practically from the start, Jones-Holt drew from her NOLA foodie roots to craft pies that were unlike anything most New Jerseyites had ever tasted.

Working with a gas-fired EarthStone 120-PAG oven, she followed the previous Market Pizza owner’s recipes to a T early on. But, over time, she began to trust her own mojo. Not long after she took over Market Pizza, Jones-Holt launched her first fundraiser for HHH, a nonprofit that allows hunters to donate venison to area food banks. “A local hunter can take the deer to a certified butcher approved by the state health department,” she says. “The meat is typically ground and then frozen for distribution to the Norwescap Food Bank. It is then distributed to the local food pantries.”

As a member of the local Rotary Club, Jones-Holt was already friends with a co-founder of HHH, a fellow Rotarian. “Our clubs have always championed food insecurity in our county,” she says. “We would raise funds the traditional way—