Getting High With Pie in Ballantyne

It’s genius, when you think about it. Eat a slice of pizza, get high, crave another, repeat. 

That’s the idea behind Spinello’s, a take and “bake” pizza infused with hemp-derived, delta-9 THC. Mike Libretto, who owns Libretto’s Pizzeria in Ballantyne, is the mastermind behind the 10-inch frozen pies available at more than 60 locations in Charlotte, including the Common Market, Crowntown Dispensary, Rhino Market & Deli, and, of course, Libretto’s. They come in 40- and 80-milligram varieties, and the packaging suggests eight slices per pie. Baking temperature is 420 degrees, natch.

Libretto is a veteran pizza baker—he opened his first pizzeria in New York in 2004—and he’s familiar with the effects of THC gummies and infused baked goods. “I tried a cupcake a friend made, and it was a great experience,” he says, “so I started thinking I could do this with pizza.”

He bought an oil infuser and began experimenting in his kitchen. “It’s all time and temperature,” he says. “My wife called me ‘A Beautiful Mind’ with all my recipes and experiments around the house. There’s some intense mixing to make sure the cannabis oil is distributed properly. I would basically make oil, bake it into the pizza, and send it out for lab testing. It took me a year to figure it all out.” 

“I wanted you to have to set the oven to 420 degrees,” says owner Mike Libretto, “because that just made sense.”

That’s because the pizza had to contain less than 0.3% of delta-9 THC, the psychoactive component of marijuana. The 2018 Farm Bill, which stopped classifying hemp as a controlled substance, allows the sale of products below this threshold. It ushered in the variety of delta-9 gummies, cookies, and seltzers on shelves today. 

Libretto also added cannabigerol (CBG), a non-psychoactive cannabinoid found in the cannabis plant. CBG has anti-inflammatory properties and can reduce anxiety and depression. It gives the pizzas what Libretto calls “more of a daytime high” so they won’t put you to sleep. And unlike certain seltzers, he says you can’t taste “even a hint” of the hemp infusion. 

“All my friends were willing participants in the sampling portion of the creation,” Libretto says with a laugh. “I started targeting a 40-milligram pizza, and it came back 18. So I made another, then another, working towards that number.”

He challenged his friends to a naming competition, too. “But nothing had that pizzazz or allure,” he says. “A friend’s fiancé is Italian, and she just looked at me one day and said, ‘How about Spinello?’ I said, ‘What on earth is that?’ It’s Italian slang for a joint. And ‘Spinello’ is Italian-sounding. So she won.”

The pizzas come in 40- and 80-milligram varieties, and the packaging suggests eight slices per pie.

His recipe perfected, Libretto began to sell Spinello’s Pizza last summer at his Ballantyne restaurant. A 40-mg pie is $19.99; the 80-mg version is $24.99. If you’re new to THC, he recommends having one slice of the 40-mg pizza to see how you feel before you try another. 

The take and bake pies were a hit, so Libretto decided to get them into more local freezers. Crowntown Dispensary was his first vendor. “If you’re ever feeling a little down and want to feel good, walk in and try to sell someone a weed pizza,” he says. “It’s an exciting product.”

He’s also committed to ensuring it’s a safe product. Every pizza has a QR code on the packaging that consumers can scan to see where the pizza was tested and how much THC it registered. “If you walk into a gas station and buy a pack of gummies, you don’t know where those are tested,” Libretto says. “It falls into the lap of the manufacturer. THC is becoming more mainstream, and with that will come more regulation and full spectrum testing. I believe it will be a requirement going forward, so I’m getting ahead of it.”