Issuu

E L E VAT I N G

THE

BUSINESS

SEPTEMBER 2026

PIZZA

PMQ.COM

INSIDE:

Dodo Pizza’s AI Bots PAGE 30

A Bulletproof Tech Stack

PAGE 38

The Wayfarer’s Tale

PAGE 44

Vinnie’s Acts Up!

PAGE 22

Coby Chafets and Adam Richardson are the breakout stars of this Brooklyn slice joint where sketch-comedy mayhem meets seriously good pizza.

A day here can

CHANGE YOUR WHOLE YEAR. If one day could HELP you run a more profitable pizza business… would you take it?

At the Pizza Tomorrow Summit, you’ll find real solutions to the every-day challenges you’re facing right now:

REDUCING food and labor

COSTS

Discovering new menu ideas that

DRIVE PROFIT

FINDING SUPPLIERS that fit your business

LEARNING

from operators who are

DOING IT RIGHT

Built for busy operators! You’ll walk away with practical ideas you can put to work immediately.

oct 25-27, 2026 Orange County Convention Center // Orlando, FL

PIZZATOMORROW.COM

FRESH STRATEGIES SERVED HOT! This isn’t just an event — it’s the East Coast’s leading trade show for pizza operators and restaurant professionals ready to grow, adapt, and stay ahead. Over three high-impact days, you’ll discover fresh ideas, smarter solutions, and real opportunities to improve your bottom line. Whether it’s a conversation with a supplier, a live demo, or a breakthrough you can take straight back to your shop, this is where momentum starts. Now in our 5th year serving the pizza community, Pizza Tomorrow Summit brings together: Hundreds of LEADING SUPPLIERS AND SOLUTION PROVIDERS— all under one roof. FREE EXPERT-LED EDUCATION to help increase margins and streamline operations.

40+ HOURS OF SESSIONS covering social media, trends, leadership, new revenue streams, and more. The LATEST MENU TRENDS AND INNOVATIONS shaping what’s next in pizza.

LIVE COMPETITIONS featuring the U.S. Pizza Team. THOUSANDS OF OPERATORS investing in the future of their businesses.

Whether you run a single location or a growing chain, this is your opportunity to connect, source, learn, and move your business forward. Rediscover your spark. Re-focus your strategy. Return with ideas that drive real results.

Plus – your registration includes access to the co-located Florida Restaurant Show.

Attend two shows with just one badge!

Crafted with integrity, because excellence deserves nothing less.

Grande Grade Milk Simple Ingredients

Traditional Cheesemaking Principles

Scan to learn more.

PEEL: A PMQ PODCAST

ELEVATING THE BUSINESS OF PIZZA

An Arrowfly Publication Volume 30, Issue 7 | September 2026 888-543-2447 ISSN 1940-2007 | Permit #5040

Arrowfly

Content Studio

CEO Matt Logan mlogan@arrowfly.com

Vice President Peggy Carouthers pcarouthers@arrowfly.com

Content

Writer Drew Filipski dfilipski@arrowfly.com

Editor in Chief Rick Hynum rhynum@arrowfly.com

BRIAN BAILEY

The Sky’s the Limit Brian Bailey wanted to be a rocket scientist after college. Instead, he answered a newspaper ad for Domino’s, took a delivery job and blasted off on a trajectory that would eventually make him the brand’s largest U.S. franchisee, with 160 stores across five states. During that first interview, the store manager didn’t just ask what Bailey could do for Domino’s; he explained what Domino’s could do for him. Bailey went home convinced that he could own stores himself one day. Years later, as he recalls in episode 56 of Peel: A PMQ Pizza Podcast, he had built 12 debt-free locations. “We had three choices: sell, coast or go big,” he says. “I didn’t want to sell, and I don’t like to coast, so we decided to go big.” That growth, he stresses, depended on strong leaders, disciplined systems and giving people room to perform. “I aim to inspire our leaders and then give them guardrails and get out of the way,” Bailey says. Despite the administrative demands of running a vast organization, Bailey still prefers working inside the stores. And his message to aspiring operators remains simple: “The sky is still the limit, especially in pizza.” Listen to Peel: A PMQ Pizza Podcast on Apple, Spotify and SoundCloud.

Scan this code to subscribe or renew your subscription to PMQ! Or visit PMQ.com/subscribe.

PMQ PIZZA | PMQ.COM

Associate Editor Tracy Morin tmorin@arrowfly.com Associate Editor/ USPT Coordinator Brian Hernandez bhernandez@arrowfly.com VP, Editorial Director Danny Klein dklein@arrowfly.com Art & Production

Writer Ya’el McCloud ymccloud@arrowfly.com Writer Abby Winterburn awinterburn@arrowfly.com Sales & Business Development Senior Vice President, Food, Retail, Hospitality Sales and Account Management Matt Waddell mwaddell@arrowfly.com

Art Director Eric Summers esummers@arrowfly.com

National Sales Manager Tom Boyles tboyles@arrowfly.com

Senior Art Director Tory Bartelt tbartelt@arrowfly.com

Customer Service Representative Brandy Pinion bpinion@arrowfly.com Customer Service Representative Tracy Willingham twillingham@arrowfly.com Founder Steve Green

PMQ PIZZA Issue 7 September 2026 (ISSN 1940-2007, Permit #5040) is published monthly in January, March, April, May, June, August, September, October, November and December by Arrowfly, 1111 Superior Ave #1120, Cleveland, OH 44114-2560. Periodical postage pricing paid at Cleveland, OH. Additional mailing offices at Bolingbrook, IL. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to PMQ PIZZA, 1111 Superior Ave #1120, Cleveland, OH 44114-2560. Opinions expressed by the editors and contributing writers are strictly their own and not necessarily those of the advertisers. All rights reserved. No portion of PMQ PIZZA may be reproduced in whole or part without written consent.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

SEPTEMBER 2026 18

How to Survive in Today’s Environment Operating a pizzeria feels like running a gauntlet in 2026. Industry veteran Michael LaMarca shares four ways to navigate the challenges and stay profitable.

The Dodo Bots An AI specialist takes a practical look at where the technology actually works in pizza operations—based on the experience of one renowned global brand.

A Bulletproof Tech Stack

A D O B E STO C K

Armed with the right technologies, there’s no reason why you can’t outmaneuver a Domino’s or Papa Johns franchisee in your hometown.

With its unique mashup of three pizza styles and multifaceted branding approach, Wayfarer Tavern is shaking up the social scene in Dayton, Kentucky.

Vinnie’s Acts Up!

Why Big Brands Bet On USPT Ambassadors Major brands all look for the same type of person: someone who has earned the respect of fellow operators and enjoys helping others grow and improve.

PMQ PIZZA | PMQ.COM

DODO PIZZA

Coby Chafets and Adam Richardson take food seriously—but almost nothing else. Their culinary chops and comedic approach to marketing have made the 66-year-old Vinnie’s Pizzeria more relevant than ever to Brooklyn’s pizza scene.

BY RICK HYNUM CO V E R P H OTO BY K AT I E H E LO

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: 10 Pizza Pulse 12 Moneymakers 54 Resource Guide 58 Pizza Hall of Fame

K AT I E H E LO

The Wayfarer’s Tale

PIZZA PULSE

SHARE YOUR STORY WITH THE PIZZA COMMUNITY PMQ Pizza’s best pizzeria profiles often come directly from subscribers to our free e-newsletter, Pizza Pulse. So if you want to get your story told, sign up at PMQ.com/pizza-pulse to get our attention! Behind every print issue is a growing digital universe, and Pizza Pulse is the gateway. Print can only hold so much, but we can go bigger online: deep-dive profiles, videos, podcasts, social posts, webinars, reader surveys and more. Here’s a look at the latest:

Subscribe to Pizza Pulse for free at PMQ.com/pizza-pulse!

A I - G E N E R AT E D I M AG E /C H ATG PT

TO N Y ’ S P I Z Z A N A P O L E TA N A

How Tony Gemignani Cracked the Portnoy Code

How 15 Locals Can Transform Your Sales

It could have been a meeting of giants when Dave Portnoy reviewed Tony’s Pizza Napoletana. Sadly, Gemignani was out of town. But he guided his team from afar to an 8.2 score—because he knew exactly what Portnoy likes best.

As a hometown pizzeria owner, you’re someone that everyone already knows. What if you leveraged your personal connections to influence respected members of your community, each of whom could influence thousands more?

Read at PMQ.com/gemignani-portnoy-review

Read at PMQ.com/influence-the-influencers

No Secrets in This Father-Son Duo’s Pizza Kitchen

PMQ PIZZA | PMQ.COM

“Our philosophy,” says CEO Carl Bachmann, “is to grow like a bush, not like a vine.” That’s why this chain keeps deepening its roots in markets where it’s already had success rather than “chasing growth for growth’s sake.”

Want to Get PMQ’s Attention? Try this! Create a Reel on Instagram, tag @pmqpizzamag and tell us why we should feature your pizzeria.

Read at PMQ.com/rikos-pizza

R I KO ’ S P I Z Z A

Read at PMQ.com/gerardos-pizzeria

The Secret to Growth for Riko’s Pizza

GERARDO’S PIZZERIA

Gerardo’s Pizzeria isn’t just an acclaimed pizza shop; owners Gerardo Moceri Sr. and his son, Gerardo Jr., welcome aspiring pizzaioli from as far away as Mexico and New York to learn the craft in their one-of-a-kind teaching kitchen.

PizzaCloud Never lose a call Never lose a web order

866Ͳ511Ͳ5521 WWW.PIZZACLOUD.NET

Because if your phones and web ordering are down, you may as well send everyone home.

We become your phone company and provide a backup Internet connection

No Busy Signals Call Recording Call Queuing / AutoͲAnswering Multiple (random) startͲofͲcall upsell messages OnͲhold music/message loops Detailed reports—hold times, lost calls etc Callerid delivered to POS system AutoͲattendants—”If you have arrived for curbside pickup press one”

•

Increase revenue and lower cost • • • • • • • •

IP Phone Service

•

• •

Cellular Backup Internet Protect against outages

When your Internet fails our cellular backup router keeps your phones, credit card processing and web orders all working. The backup kicks in automatically in seconds. So quickly you will not even drop calls in progress when your primary Internet goes down! The same router can be used to create chainͲ wide virtual private network to connect your locations. SDͲWAN LTE/LTEͲA (4G/5G) modems.

Use our Text Messaging Service to push online ordering, drive additional revenue, & send upsell messages! Now offering SMS/Text message solutions Using your existing phone number!

On the PBX

SMS Marketing

“Press one to receive a text message with links to our onlne ordering”.

Manage bulk text message marketing from our system to drive increased revenue. As low as $0.01 per message.

Group text messaging to communicate with your employees (drivers, bartenders, all staff etc).

Sales@pizzacloud.net

www.pizzacloud.net

866Ͳ511Ͳ5521

MONEYMAKERS

For nearly two years, Bill Pustari has been delivering free pies to families with critically ill kids at a local hospital— and keeping it on the down-low. MO D E R N A P I Z Z A

THE PRICE OF A PHONE NUMBER

T’S ONE OF THE NEW HAVEN, Connecticut, pizza community’s best-guarded secrets: the personal phone number for Bill Pustari, owner of Modern Apizza. But Rob and Stacey Bland discovered that Pustari has his price. For nearly two years, Modern Apizza has been quietly sending free pizzas every Friday to families caring for critically ill kids at Yale New Haven Children’s Hospital. Meanwhile, local artist Michael Pollack, founder of New Haven Pizza Club, is a supporter of Feeding Families Foundation, which coordinates restaurant meals for families at children’s hospitals in five states. And the Blands, who support all of the above, really wanted Pustari’s number. So Pollack calculated the 12

PMQ PIZZA | PMQ.COM

value of Modern Apizza’s weekly pizza donations since the initiative began and proposed a trade: a $26,000 matching donation from the Blands to Feeding Families in exchange for Pustari’s number. The deal went through. But Pustari says his weekly pizza donation isn’t about publicity. “These families are going through something most people can’t imagine,” he says. “If pizza can make their Friday a little easier, that’s what we’re going to do. I never expected anything in return, and I definitely didn’t expect this. What Rob and Stacey are doing is incredible.” And, yes, the Blands got Pustari’s number. “Whether Billy answers,” Pollack laughs, “is between them.”

MONEYMAKERS C A R M I N E ’ S I TA L I A N R ESTA U R A N T

PIZZA BAGELS GET A GLOW-UP Carmine’s Italian Restaurant and Tompkins Square Bagels, two iconic New York City concepts, recently tapped two other NYC icons—pizza and bagels—to boost awareness for their brands in a creative way. Their collaboration featured four loaded pizza bagels, released one per week throughout May at all Tompkins Square Bagel locations in Manhattan. The bagel lineup included the Traditional Tomato Basil, the Spicy Soppressata, the Vodka Chicken Parm and the Eggs in Purgatory, sold for $12.50 to $14. To build buzz, they held a press event at Tompkins Square Bagels’ Avenue A location that drew more than 25 writers, influencers and industry VIPs. For restaurateurs planning their own collabs, Tompkins Square owner Christopher Pugliese offers a little advice: “You can have the most creative collaboration idea in the world, but if it doesn’t taste good, people aren’t going to come in or come back for it. We wanted to make sure we created something that people not only thought looked delicious but actually tasted delicious, too. Aside from that, I’d make sure there’s a solid marketing campaign behind it to ensure that customers near you—and beyond—are hearing about it.”

G A R G I U LO ’ S R ESTAU R A N T

Gargiulo’s Restaurant transports guests to Southern Italy in the Sorrento Pizza Garden.

Chef Glenn Rolnick of Carmine’s preps the Vodka Chicken Parm bagel.

ESCAPE TO SORRENTO Coney Island has changed a lot since its 1920s heyday, but one thing remains the same: You can still get Italian dishes like linguine with clam sauce and penne Pasqualina at Gargiulo’s Restaurant, which has been in business since 1907. And in the summer, you can also get pizza—but only on Friday nights. The Sorrento Pizza Garden is a relatively new wrinkle, a seasonal outdoor event centered around a wood-fired oven and Neapolitan pizza. It has evolved into one of Gargiulo’s most anticipated attractions, generating inquiries months before opening day every June. The space itself is decorated to evoke the atmosphere of Southern Italy, offering a brief respite from city life. “I want people to feel like they’re not in Coney Island for a few hours,” says chef Matthew Cutolo. “I want them to feel like they’re sitting on a patio in Sorrento.” He adds, “If we’re trying to create a little piece of Southern Italy in Brooklyn, Neapolitan pizza is a natural fit. The oven came from Naples, the style comes from Naples, and the experience is rooted in that tradition.”

SEPTEMBER 2026 | PMQ.COM

RECIPE OF THE MONTH | SPONSORED BY GALBANI PROFESSIONALE

•

A Playbook for Personal Growth

Karvelas Pizza Co.’s Georgia Pie SOUTHERN CHARM MEETS NEW YORK TRADITION

Ingredients

Directions

• • •

1. Combine the pizza sauce, minced garlic, extra virgin olive oil, and sliced basil leaves in a mixing bowl. Stir gently until fully incorporated. Set aside. 2. Stretch the pizza dough evenly to a 16” round on a lightly floured surface or pizza peel, maintaining a thin profile consistent with Sicilian style. 3. Sprinkle a light, even layer of dry oregano across the dough. 4. Evenly top with Galbani Premio Mozzarella. 5. Drizzle or pipe the prepared sauce in thin, parallel strips across the top of the cheese layer. This technique allows the sauce to caramelize slightly during baking while complementing the cheese. 6. Apply chosen toppings lightly and evenly. Exercise restraint to ensure the sauce and cheese remain prominent. 7. Bake in a preheated pizza oven or conventional oven at the temperature and time appropriate for your equipment until the crust is golden and crisp, the cheese is melted and lightly browned, and the sauce strips have set.

• •

16 oz. pizza dough 9–10 oz. Galbani Premio Mozzarella 7–8 oz. pizza sauce • 1 Tbsp. minced garlic • 1 Tbsp. extra virgin olive oil • 3 fresh basil leaves, thinly sliced Dry oregano (to taste) Light selection of favorite topping(s) (applied sparingly)

About the Pizza Joey Karvelas knows a little Southern charm can go a long way. That’s exactly the idea behind the Georgia Pie—a hometown favorite inspired by the iconic Long Island Grandma pizza. Joey took everything he loved about the New York classic and gave it a warm Georgia welcome, pairing homemade sauce with creamy Galbani Premio Mozzarella on a thin, crispy crust. The result is a pie that’s simple, satisfying and proof that when quality ingredients are treated right, they don’t need much else to win people over.

PMQ PIZZA | PMQ.COM

What's my Italian Inspiration? It’s choosing ingredients that work as hard as

I do. After 10 years of using the leading premium Mozzarella, I took a closer look at my food costs and tested Galbani® Premio. The consistency is outstanding, the reheat is next level, and the butterfat gives me the melt and flavor I’m looking for. And when I saw the price, it sealed the deal.

—Joey Karvelas, Owner, Karvelas Pizza Co.

Learn more at GalbaniPro.com

@GalbaniProfessionaleUS

Find your Ispirazione Italiana

A D O B E STO C K / J E L E N A

BEYOND THE BOX: BUILDING YOUR PIZZA BUSINESS

How to Survive in Today’s Environment Every day brings a new challenge, from higher food and labor costs to third-party and credit card fees. But focus on the basics, and you can still thrive. BY MICHAEL P. LaMARCA

VERY DAY IN THE PIZZA BUSINESS brings a new issue or challenge to adjust to or navigate through. It feels more like running a gauntlet than passing a finish line. There are only so many things that are in your control and that you can count on week to week or month to month. All you can do is stay focused on the basics. The effects of high energy and fuel costs are felt all over, from our COGS to turning on our ovens. The more it costs to ship our products, the more we get charged for them, and that means we should charge more for them on our menu. 18

PMQ PIZZA | PMQ.COM

Higher fuel costs also eat into customers’ disposable income and limits their dining-out options. It makes delivering pizzas less profitable, too. Labor always has and always will be an issue. The best we can do is accept that and adapt our business model to fit the landscape for the times. Five or six years ago, it was hard to find people to fill spots on your schedule, but you could offer more competitive wages to entice them to join your team. Today, the challenge is both finding people and the cost of labor. No matter what you offer, it seems like it’s not enough.

BEYOND THE BOX: BUILDING YOUR PIZZA BUSINESS

A percentage of each order goes to credit card fees. You may not always notice those $1 to $2 fees, but it’s a death by a thousand cuts.

•

Operate your business more tightly than ever: Control the controllables. Make sure your labor and COGS are in line each week. Hitting prime (labor + COGS = 60% or less) each week will give you a foundation to work your way back to or increase your profitability. There are times in life when you can let your sleeves down, and there are times when you need to roll them up and eat some hours. Now is the time to roll them up! Analyze your menu mix: You need to maximize what sells on your menu and eliminate the items that aren’t moving. Focus on what you’re known for. It’s always better, operationally and financially, to sell one item a million times than to sell a million items one time each. Win every order: That’s our philosophy at Master Pizza. It means offering friendly service and great pizza

A D O B E STO C K /A N N A

The days of calling up a favorite local pizza shop for an order are nearly gone. Today’s customer probably wants to order online from your website or, better yet, from your app, which means you need to offer both! And that requires a POS system. This technology, which is becoming more and more necessary, has its benefits and can save on labor while enhancing the customer experience, but the benefits must outweigh the costs. Third-party delivery has certainly changed the pizza game, but it’s here, and you are probably using it. Aggregators have their own customers, and if you’re not on their site, you’re not an option. But to be an option will cost you a percentage of the order, forcing you to weigh the cost of accepting these orders against their impact on your profitability. The last gauntlet is credit card fees. Online ordering and the increased use of credit cards have significantly reduced cash orders. A percentage of each order goes to credit card fees. You may not always notice those $1 to $2 fees, but it’s a death by a thousand cuts. At the end of the month, you’ll see how much you’re paying in fees compared to your sales. It could be another hole through which cash is falling if you’re not accounting for it in your COGS. So how do you navigate these challenges and stay profitable?

•

that’s ready fast. Friendly service means the customer is greeted kindly, served with respect and sincerely thanked for their support. Great pizza means it’s always made fresh, correctly and consistently. And “ready fast” means the ordering process was convenient and the pizza was ready on time and served (or arrived) hot. The more orders you win, the more chance you have of getting repeat business. One last solution: Raise prices. There is no better time than now to do that. Even if customers don’t understand all the costs associated with running your business, they’re aware that their own everyday cost of living has gone up. There will be little explanation needed for your next menu price increase.

There are so many expenses, both up front and hidden, that go into providing excellent service and awesome pizza. It costs what it costs to provide what you provide. Be confident in that truth. If the costs go up to keep the level of quality and service you provide, you need to raise your price rather than absorb the added costs. You cannot stay in business if you are losing money. Michael LaMarca is a veteran pizzeria owner/operator and owner/CEO of Master Pizza Franchise Group in Cleveland. To engage with him directly, follow him at @michaelplamarca on Instagram and Facebook.

SEPTEMBER 2026 | PMQ.COM

SPONSORED BY ORLANDO FOODS

When Scale Meets Heritage in Pizzerias H O W O P E R ATO RS A R E CU R AT I N G T H E P E R F ECT B I T E.

hat goes into the perfect slice of pizza? A delicately balanced sweet and acidic tomato, creamy, rich mozzarella, and a dough base with flavorful yeast create the perfect bite. Quality in these base ingredients is a necessity that pizzeria operators and consumers notice. According to Chef Domenico “Mimmo” Tolomeo, corporate chef for Orlando Foods and a certified pizzaiolo by the Associazione Pizzaiouli Napoletani—the governing body of pizza makers in Italy—learning how to create the perfect bite isn’t the true test; it’s being able to do it at scale. “When you get into a real service and are doing 450–600 pizzas in a night, you learn how to manage tickets, dough and the oven,” Tolomeo says. For Tolomeo, that same discipline extends to ingredient selection—particularly when it comes to tomatoes and tomato sauces. “There is no way to process a great flavor if the raw product isn’t good,” Tolomeo says. “Grow it well, harvest it at the right time, process it quickly and don’t overwork it. The tomato has to come first.” Understanding that principle is one thing, but knowing how to apply it is another. How do operators decide when to use a DOP San Marzano versus a quality whole-peeled plum tomato? “If the tomato is the star of the dish, a DOP San Marzano makes a lot of sense,” Tolomeo says. “But in a busy pizza operation or doing a longer-cooked sauce with a lot of other flavors, a premium wholepeeled plum tomato gives operators exactly what they need.” Authentic, DOP-certified San Marzano tomatoes are exclusively grown in the Campania region of Southern Italy and are appreciated for their balanced flavor and structure. However, operators need to be careful, as many products are labeled San Marzano without being authentically grown in Campania. Tolomeo advises chefs to look beyond the label. “A true San Marzano is more elongated and fragile than a traditional plum tomato, with fewer seeds and thinner skin,” Tolomeo says. “It has a great balance of sweetness and acidity, along with a pulp structure that works beautifully for pizza and

sauces. But the name alone doesn’t guarantee quality—chefs still must check the can to make sure that it’s legitimate.” For Tolomeo, there is one tomato choice he stands behind. “I used Ciao from when I was at Kesté to when I became an operator myself. What I love most about the company is that Ciao is all about preserving the highest-quality tomatoes with consistency.” Ciao’s DOP-certified San Marzano tomatoes are grown within the protected Campania region and produced according to strict standards for variety, cultivation, processing and traceability. Their premium whole-peeled plum tomatoes offer the same consistency and flavor for more complex applications. Ciao tomatoes are sourced and packed in Southern Italy within hours of harvest, preserving the fruit’s flavor, color and body. Creating the perfect bite is never easy, but leveraging high-quality ingredients like Ciao’s tomatoes allows operators to control one more aspect of the process and serve pizza they are proud of.

Discover the difference of Ciao tomatoes at orlandofoods.com/products. 20

PMQ PIZZA | PMQ.COM

THE TOMATO ON EVERY GREAT PIZZA

CIAO FROM ITALY IN EVERY CAN CIAOTOMATOES

ORLANDOFOODS.COM/CIAO

Live from New York, it’s Vinnie’s Pizzeria, where Coby Chafets and Adam Richardson spin SNL-style humor into razor-sharp marketing—but the food is serious business. BY RICK HYNUM | PHOTOS BY KATIE HELO

INNIE’S PIZZERIA HAS THRIVED FOR 66 YEARS, but it was never hailed as the best slice joint in Brooklyn—the competition is stiff, after all, and its previous owners weren’t exactly hung up on artisanal quality. But the funniest slice joint? That’s a different story.

Adam Richardson (left) and Coby Chafets lean on improvisation and spontaneity— and a team of naturally funny employees—to keep Vinnie’s marketing humor fresh and Gen Z-friendly.

PMQ PIZZA | PMQ.COM

Alessandro Duncan is one of Vinnie’s best-loved comedic performers, but Chafets says he’s also “an incredibly talented chef with a genuine love for and dedication to pizza.”

Before he and his partner sold Vinnie’s two years ago, Sean Berthiaume turned it into a viral sensation with stunts like an edible pizza box made of pizza and a pizza topped with tiny slices of pizza. The clever menu boards, spotlighting recipes inspired by pop culture and featuring Berthiaume’s own art, earned renown too, as he riffed on everything from Stranger Things (“Stranger Wings” and “The Demogorgonzola”) to classic films (“Taters of the Lost Ark” and “Smokey and the Bean Dip”). So when Coby Chafets and Adam Richardson took over Vinnie’s reins, 24

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they had some big, floppy clown shoes to fill. Not a problem. If anything, they’ve made Vinnie’s even funnier with their Reels and TikTok videos. Chafets, the wry, shrewd, fast-talking New Yorker, brings verbal wit, goofy characters and a hint of Groucho Marx to every scene, while Richardson, with his impish grin, malleable face and imposing physical presence, can get laughs just by striding haughtily into the room. Their videos, which earn thousands of likes and views every day, smoothly meld canny marketing with screwball comedy—it’s like “SNL

for pizza,” as Chafets says, and it’s a laugh-out-loud blast. But more importantly, these two pizzaiolos have also made the Brooklyn pizza institution a better place to eat. “A refrain from our previous job at [famed New York City restaurant] Don Angie was, we take the food really seriously, but not ourselves,” Chafets says. “When we took over Vinnie’s, it was equally our mission to keep the stuff that works—the general vibe and attitude and everything that it meant to people—and to level up the pizza and make it part of the

general New York pizza conversation in a way it hadn’t been before. So the food is always front-of-mind for us now.”

“Does This Bring Us Joy?”

Give credit to Berthiaume: He took an otherwise ordinary slice shop and landed it on Jimmy Kimmel Live. His quirky humor, Chafets says, “was baked into the identity of the Vinnie’s that I came up in and learned from. But I don’t think anybody was writing home about the food.” After managing Vinnie’s for years, Chafets left to attend culinary school,

“Looking at each item on the menu, we asked ourselves, ‘Does this bring us joy?’ And if it didn’t bring us joy or if the quality wasn’t up to our standards, we either changed it or got rid of it.” Adam Richardson, Vinnie’s Pizzeria

then did an externship at Don Angie under Adams. When the chance to purchase Vinnie’s arose, he says, “My first thought was, I should do it, and my second thought was, I can’t do

it without a partner. And my third thought was, the only partner I would consider is Adam. Having worked for him, I saw the effect he had as a leader. It’s incredibly easy and common for the head chef, even at their best, to be a little short or bad-tempered with people, but Adam wasn’t like that at all. When the line cooks were at a bar after work, we’d say, ‘If Adam ever leaves the restaurant, I’ll follow him wherever he goes.’” Chafets and Richardson made the leap to pizzeria ownership together in 2024. On the culinary side, they saw opportunities for improvement SEPTEMBER 2026 | PMQ.COM

but needed to tread lightly—too much change too quickly might scare longtime regulars away. “Looking at each item on the menu, we asked ourselves, ‘Does this bring us joy?’ And if it didn’t bring us joy or if the quality wasn’t up to our standards, we either changed it or got rid of it,” Richardson says. “Coby completely redid the dough recipe and got rid of all the bromated and bleached flours that we’d inherited. We upgraded our pizza sauce and our mozzarella as well. We’re even taking fresh oregano and dehydrating it overnight.” Chafets, in fact, eliminated bromated flour several months before New York’s state legislature passed a controversial ban on the dough additive, classified as a possible carcinogen, earlier this year. He has little patience for change-averse pizza makers who have publicly complained that the ban will force them to alter their dough formulas. Determined to preserve Vinnie’s legacy as a classic New York-style slice shop, he sought out the advice of more experienced pizzaioli, then put his head down and got to work. “All I had to do,” he says, “was go in by myself on Mondays for four months and mix dough over and over again until I figured out how to do it with the new flour. And guess what? 26

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“All I had to do was go in by myself on Mondays for four months and mix dough over and over again until I figured out how to do it with [non-bromated] flour. And guess what? The product is better.” Coby Chafets, Vinnie’s Pizzeria

The product is better, and I don’t have to lecture my customers about anything. You’ve never seen a video of me in the walk-in, going, ‘This is our dough, and we use non-bromated flour.’ I feel like that’s a conversation for pizza heads and…thoroughly uninteresting to the average person. It’s lame. It’s our job to know how to make pizza, and it’s the customer’s job to eat pizza with their friends and enjoy it.” And there’s more to enjoy now. Newly designed menus include a list

of culinary “brags” on the back page, reminding customers that Vinnie’s is no ordinary slice joint—from its housemade chili crisp and garlic confit with lemon juice to ParmigianoReggiano purchased in large hunks and freshly grated in-house. “We make a fantastic vodka sauce, which is actually vegan,” Richardson says. “It’s made with coconut milk, but it doesn’t taste coconutty. It’s a great, creamy, spicy vodka sauce and makes a fantastic slice with our cup-and-char pepperoni. It’s one of our best sellers.”

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SNL for Pizza

Meanwhile, every day brings a new LTO pizza or menu item. And that’s where the “funny” starts. Not funny weird—although certain specials can be a little odd—but funny ha-ha. For each special, Chafets, with his team’s help, dreams up an unhinged video that’s almost guaranteed to stop the scroll on Instagram. Sous chef Alessandro Duncan turning cartwheels as he describes Vinnie’s take on garlic wheels (“I’m doin’ cartwheels for Gar Wheels!”)— and getting dizzier by the second. A pompous “Head Chef Adam” lording over the cooks until Duncan brings him a duck confit slice with an orange and cherry sauce (it’s so tasty he’s

rendered cross-eyed with joy). An employee named Sadie rapping about a pie called “Sadie’s Delight” but reading the lyrics straight off her phone. Chafets as a singing cowboy touting a pie topped with “cowboy stuff ” (“Cookin’ up some seasoned beef / eatin’ it with my cowboy teeth / well, that’s all part of doin’ cowboy stuff ”)— and don’t blink or you’ll miss a brief cutaway to Sadie and Alessandro galloping down the sidewalk on stick horses.

“[A restaurant kitchen is] an island of misfit toys. All these personalities, all these strange and delightful people that we employ, are just fantastic.” Adam Richardson, Vinnie’s Pizzeria

PMQ PIZZA | PMQ.COM

It’s hilarious, but is it good marketing? The answer, we believe, is an unequivocal yes. All of that inspired silliness keeps Vinnie’s Pizzeria popping up in social feeds with a consistent message: Vinnie’s is the fun, welcoming go-to spot for something new, flavorful and innovative every day. For instance, the Gar Wheels video, posted in late July, garnered more than 27,000 views and 1,700 likes on Instagram in one day, plus nearly 3,200 views and 552 likes on TikTok. “Sadie’s Delight” racked up 39,200 views and 2,164 likes on Instagram alone. Chafets even invented a pizza topped entirely with ingredients sliced into triangles. To hear him brag about it, you’d think he’d unlocked the secrets of time travel. To prove no other pizza shop offers such an innovation, he rings up a fictional competitor called Bozo’s, where the pepperoni slices are lamely circular and the veggies are cut into “parallelograms.” That video garnered 111,000-plus views and 8,333 likes on Instagram. “I grew up a huge comedy nerd,” Chafets says. “I loved SNL. I fell in love with the old DVDs of the best of John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd.” As a kid, he shot and edited his own funny videos to amuse himself and his friends, a skill that would prove useful later in life, as he immersed himself in the back-of-house madness and mayhem of restaurant life. “The funniest people and the funniest things I’ve ever heard or seen have been in kitchens, not comedy clubs,” he says. “They’re all working superhard, they’re all punchy, they get to know each other really well. It’s like a pirate ship. So we made the decision to just start pointing the camera at them rather than trying to write scripts or manufacture [the humor].” Richardson likens a restaurant kitchen to “an island of misfit toys.” He adds, “It’s an amalgamation of

“I’m reading a biography of Lorne Michaels, and I keep thinking, wow, in many ways, we are running Saturday Night Live for pizza. It’s a little bit like running a sketch troupe.” Coby Chafets, Vinnie’s Pizzeria

people that you’d normally never meet in the outside world. But here in this place, we all come together to do a job, and I love that. All these personalities, all these strange and delightful people that we employ, are just fantastic.” No one at Vinnie’s is required to appear on camera. But the born performers bring their own fresh ideas and improvisational chops that foster a spontaneous and joyful vibe. “I’m reading a biography of Lorne Michaels, and I keep thinking, wow, in many ways, we are running Saturday Night Live for pizza,” Chafets

says. “It’s a little bit like running a sketch troupe.”

A Hard-Nosed Third-Party Deal

But it’s not all fun and games and duck confit at Vinnie’s. Behind the comedic masks you’ll find a pair of savvy businessmen who are committed to across-the-board excellence. “We really pride ourselves on our hospitality,” Richardson says. “If you come into our store, I guarantee you’ll get a friendly hello. You’ll get a person who will walk you through all the slices. They know that’s 70% to 75% of

their job—being the face of the store, bringing their best moods—and we try to make sure they get that same energy from us as well. It will trickle down to your people.” Where Vinnie’s service suffered, however, was at the customers’ doorsteps, thanks to unreliable thirdparty delivery aggregators. Chafets finally cut all but one loose and hammered out a hard-nosed deal that has reaped significant savings. “I showed Grubhub how much they were going to lose if we dropped them and what they had to do: 0% for the first year and 1% increases per year for the next five years, capped permanently at 5%. Those are the only terms under which I would ever allow a third party to have anything to do with our business at this point.” (There’s more to the story behind that Grubhub deal—look for it in a future issue of PMQ’s e-newsletter, Pizza Pulse.) Currently, Vinnie’s annual sales stand at $1.7 million, a solid figure for a shop that seats just 12 people. And its culinary street cred keeps rising with Richardson and Chafets at the helm. “I can’t say we’ve gotten that much busier,” Chafets says, “because we’re a small shop, so there’s a limit to how much volume we can do. The main difference is how impassioned the customers are to be here. And now they want to try everything on the menu. The whole staff gets recognized on the street, and people are just really, really happy to be with us.” And there are more positive changes to come. “We’re not just going to be resting on our laurels,” Richardson says. “It’s wonderful to look back at everything we’ve accomplished in the two years since we took Vinnie’s over. But can we make things better? Absolutely. Watch us in the future, because I guarantee we’re going to come up with something great.” Rick Hynum is PMQ’s editor in chief.

SEPTEMBER 2026 | PMQ.COM

PMQ PIZZA | PMQ.COM

The

DODO

Bots Dodo Pizza, a tech-forward global brand, has built— and is still building—an AI system that delivers more transparency, more control and fewer blind spots for franchisees. BY BORIS GERN | PHOTOS COURTESY DODO PIZZA

IS ONE OF THE MOST DISCUSSED TOPICS in the restaurant industry—and one of the most oversold. According to Deloitte’s 2025 report on AI in restaurants, 82% of executives across 11 countries planned to increase AI investment in the coming year, while fewer than half considered their organizations technically or operationally ready to do it. Voice ordering, chatbots, automated support, AI-generated marketing, smart recs—some of it is genuinely useful, and some is still closer to a demo than a working tool.

SEPTEMBER 2026 | PMQ.COM

This article takes a practical look at where AI actually works in pizza operations—demand forecasting, quality control, analytics, franchisee support—based on the experience of one international network: Dodo Pizza, part of Dodo Brands. Founded in 2011 and digital-first from the start, the company has grown a tech-driven franchise to more than 1,700 restaurants across 26 countries, with 2025 revenue topping $1.8 billion. Its operating platform is Dodo IS, a proprietary cloud system used across the whole network. It handles the core of running restaurants: who’s on shift, whether quality holds, what’s selling or not selling, where each order is, and how marketing reaches the right guest. AI becomes useful when the data is already clean, the processes talk to each other, and there’s somewhere for an insight to land—and that’s the foundation Dodo spent the previous decade building.

Analytics is a powerful tool, and most brands already have dashboards full of it. The harder part is turning all those numbers into decisions quickly. Control During Peak Hours

The Dodo IS dashboard offers plain-language analysis to help managers make better decisions. Meanwhile, the AI system also reviews customer-submitted pizza photos for visible problems.

PMQ PIZZA | PMQ.COM

Every operator knows the Friday-night rush. There are never quite enough hands on shift, ovens are past capacity, drivers are running behind, and the kitchen never climbs out of catch-up mode. Guests feel it as slow, unreliable service; for the franchisee, it shows up as orders lost, a slide in ratings, a crew under more pressure than the night needed. Here’s where Dodo IS does the heavy lifting for franchise partners. Its forecasting tool reads the load itself— expected peaks, the day of the week, the demand patterns behind them—and estimates what a given shift actually needs: how many people at the counter, how many in the kitchen, how many

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After delivery, customers are invited to rate their order and add a photo of the pizza they received. That’s where AI comes in. drivers out on the road. It’s built into the platform, and it adapts to the rush automatically. The real advantage is the moment before the rush, when a manager is juggling more variables than anyone can hold in their head at once: yesterday’s sales, how orders are trending, what’s happening locally. A solid forecast turns that scramble into a plan made in advance, so the busiest hours stay manageable instead of spiraling. The same logic extends to delivery. In some markets, where Dodo runs its own drivers, Dodo IS is building smarter tracking and ETA prediction that’s already being tested in part of the network. The more of the delivery chain a brand controls, the more honest and accurate it can make the timing it shows a guest.

Quality Control

Consistency is difficult at scale. One bad pizza may cost one customer, but the same problem repeated across a network chips away at the franchise’s core promise: that a Dodo pizza tastes like a Dodo pizza wherever you order it. For a partner, quality control is about protecting that promise at scale. Dodo Pizza puts AI to work right after the order is done. After delivery, customers are invited to rate their order and add a photo of the pizza they received. That’s where AI comes in. The system reads each image and checks it against the standard, flagging visible problems: a burnt or uneven crust, sauce that doesn’t reach the edges, sloppy or missing cuts, a pie that’s simply the wrong size. None of this runs unsupervised. Every flag the model raises is double-checked by the controlling team, and where AI can’t make the call, pizzas are reviewed by a person, the way they always were. Those checks feed into the system and can move a pizzeria’s quality rating. Given enough data, patterns surface on their own: a recurring training gap, a process that’s slipped, sometimes a hardware issue, like an oven quietly drifting out of spec. By the team’s own numbers, 34

PMQ PIZZA | PMQ.COM

the approach runs more quality checks while cutting the cost per report by about 25%.

From Dashboards to Decisions

Analytics is a powerful tool, and most brands already have dashboards full of it. The harder part is turning all those numbers into decisions quickly. Dodo IS makes those tables easier to read and act on. AI interprets what’s on screen for you. Hit an analysis button, and you get back plain-language explanations, anomalies worth noticing, and hypotheses about what’s driving them. For a franchisee running the business day to day, that’s a fast way to keep a finger on the pulse without digging through raw tables. There’s also Blender AI, a chatbot living inside the company messenger. Ask it an operational question, and it answers fast: order metrics, customers and orders segmented by occasion or behavior, the status of product stops. It’ll export the results to CSV. The payoff is speed. Instead of queuing for a report or flagging down an analyst, you ask and get a starting point. You still bring your own judgment, but the first pass of analysis happens in seconds.

Support Infrastructure Matters

For a franchisee, the tech inside the four walls of the restaurant is only half the system. The other half is what happens when something goes wrong: a broken oven, an escalation, a fuzzy standard, a local tweak that needs sign-off. All of it has to move fast. That’s the infrastructure Dodo Pizza has built around its partners—and one it continues to shape together with the network. Internally, the company funnels incoming operational requests into one place so support teams can move quicker on them. An operations bot, for instance, gathers requests from partners and managers and sorts them instead of letting them pile up across a dozen chat threads. It’s the unglamorous part that decides whether daily operations

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hold together. A network only grows as fast as its support can. There’s also a marketplace growing up around Dodo IS. Some of its tools come from the company; others are built by the staff themselves— someone hits a recurring headache, vibe-codes a small tool to kill it, and leaves it on the shelf for everyone else. Some of it isn’t AI at all, and some isn’t even built in-house: Tools like Dodo Alarms for food-safety checks or Design Terminal for rolling out new layouts come from outside developers. A partner can pick whatever fits their market instead of reinventing it. The AI part is a more deliberate bet. The company is making it systematic with a new unit, the AI Hub, whose job is to lower the barrier so getting an AI tool into production isn’t only for the enthusiasts. The focus is shared building blocks: agents, assistants, connectors created inside the management company that anyone can spin up and reuse. And it all becomes part of the same marketplace, backed by an opened-up knowledge base so those agents can draw on the company’s own up-to-date information.

Instead of moving revenue, some AI tools give time back, clearing repetitive work so a central team can support a much bigger network without growing at the same rate.

Where AI Saves Time

Instead of moving revenue, some AI tools give time back, clearing repetitive work so a central team can support a much bigger network without growing at the same rate. As a network grows, the small repetitive tasks multiply with it: document checks, recurring support questions, design tweaks, reporting. None of it is hard, but together it eats the hours that should go to real decisions. So Dodo has pointed AI at a lot of it. An accounting bot cuts down manual document reconciliation and saves about 160 hours of work. The AI Dodo Bot, inside the corporate messenger, helps staff find their way around the knowledge base and handle support requests. Design teams lean on AI to speed up parts of editing and production. But the best version of AI in operations keeps people in charge. AI can suggest, explain and flag a problem, but the call still sits with the operators and managers who know the business. AI gets context wrong sometimes, too—an answer comes back thin, or off, or as a hypothesis that still needs checking. It’s important to treat AI as a layer that supports the decision rather than makes it.

What Operators Should Learn From This

For a pizzeria operator, the takeaway is simple: Don’t start with the cleverest AI tool you can find. Start with operational discipline. Before AI can help with anything, 36

PMQ PIZZA | PMQ.COM

the business underneath it needs clean data, processes that run the same way twice, standards people understand, and numbers they trust. AI only works when that foundation is already solid. AI fits naturally into Dodo IS because the platform is still actively being built—by a team of more than 300 engineers. For a partner, that means new capabilities arrive as part of the system, not as separate tools to figure out. With the system carrying the operational load, opening a new pizzeria is lighter work, and a partner running 100 of them can still track performance and hold strong numbers across all of them. For anyone weighing up a franchise, this shifts what’s worth asking about. A strong brand and a popular menu matter, but the sharper questions are about what’s underneath: how the restaurant is run day to day, how quality gets watched, how the numbers turn into decisions, how support reaches you when you need it. AI isn’t a magic fix for pizza operations. But built into real processes, fed clean data and used by people who know what they’re doing, it becomes a practical way to scale what already works. In the end, it’s about building a restaurant business with more transparency, more control and fewer blind spots—technology built into the foundation, not added after the fact. Boris Gern is the AI lead for Dodo Brands.

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BULLETPROOF

TECH STACK

Is your pizzeria’s tech stack hurting your sales and marketing? It could be—and you might not even realize it. BY MATT PLAPP

EDITOR’S NOTE:

N HIS REGULAR COLUMN at PMQ.com, Matt Plapp, a leading restaurant consultant and CEO of America’s Best Restaurants, guides readers on the path to building the ultimate restaurant marketing plan. Here, he explains how your pizzeria’s tech stack drives sales and marketing— and common tech mistakes that must be addressed.

SEPTEMBER 2026 | PMQ.COM

Matt Plapp visits with Ashlee Powell and Heather Schmidt, owners of Capuano’s Pizza House, to learn how their new POS system has paved the way for growth. M AT T P L A P P

In 1999, when I worked in radio advertising, my clients included both local restaurants and chains like Bob Evans. I’d sit back and watch as Bob Evans bought spots on five radio stations, sponsored the Cincinnati Reds, ran ads on TV and cable, and posted billboards all over town. Meanwhile, my local mom-and-pops struggled to buy one radio station ad a few days per month and to do some direct mail drops. What I love the most about marketing in 2026 is that a one-location pizzeria has the same opportunity as Papa Johns. Today, everyone is on the same playing field. Here’s why: • • • •

•

Point-of-sale companies provide online ordering platforms and apps for next to nothing—and they’re sometimes free. Websites can be developed for under $1,000. Social media, like Facebook and Instagram, give you the exact opportunity that TV did, and it’s free. Targeted ads can be run on Facebook and Instagram for $1 daily. They can be targeted based on any combination of consumer data you can dream of and in a radius as small as one mile. Email, text and loyalty marketing are the backbone of your marketing plan. How is it possible in 2026 for pizzerias to not be gathering customer data for later usage?

PMQ PIZZA | PMQ.COM

To succeed in today’s environment, your pizzeria’s tech stack must be bulletproof. I know this stuff can be confusing, so I want to cover what I see as the basics—the bare bones that you must have buttoned up and why. Your independent pizzeria and national brands have exactly the same opportunity; in fact, there’s no reason you can’t move ahead of bigger brands, since you are more nimble. You don’t need a board meeting to change your marketing; you just need to take action. Below are some must-haves for every pizzeria in 2026 and beyond. They’re not listed in any order of importance, simply because they’re all equally important!

Your Website

Honestly, I can’t believe we are having this conversation in 2026, but we are. In 1999, I built my first website for our family business. By 2010, it was obvious the internet wasn’t going anywhere, and here we are in 2026, and many of you still have website issues, or no website at all. You must have a website that you own, and you’d better have today’s tech plugged into it (everything on this list) and

Your Facebook page is not a replacement for a website. You don’t own that page, and Facebook can take it down at any time.

L I T T L E I TA LY R I STO R A N T E

A D O B E STO C K / VA KS M A N V

The owners of Little Italy Ristorante, located in Groveport, Ohio, use the brand’s website to tell their backstory and convey authenticity.

Your online ordering needs to be a system you control, not one of the third-party vendors. keep it up to date. Your customers are comparing you to the other sites they visit, like Amazon, Pizza Hut, etc. It’s not challenging or expensive to do this correctly. Your website is the No. 2 place where customers interact with your brand outside your storefront—if you have one. Moreover, your Facebook page is not a replacement for a website. You don’t own that page, and Facebook can take it down at any time. Your website is another piece of real estate that you own. Here are a few of the items that are often overlooked on websites: • •

• • • • •

An “About Us” page with your story and pictures of you and your team. The story itself should have some depth, preferably including your pizzeria’s history. A text-based menu with pictures of each item. Do not use a PDF or link externally to a menu or an online ordering system, as many of you do. A text-based website menu is not only much easier to read; it will also help with your SEO. A “Contact Us” page with your physical address, link to directions, phone number and all social media links Online ordering (we’ll return to this one later) Strong calls to action to join your loyalty program A “Now Hiring” page with an online application Special pages for catering, events and other services you offer

Online Ordering

I still recall a conversation with one of my favorite restaurants in March 2020. “Your POS has a great online ordering system,” I said. “Why aren’t you using it?” The owner had many excuses, none of which were valid. Then COVID hit, and he called me. “Matt, what do I do? How do I turn it on? I need to set up online ordering ASAP.” Long story short, it was live within a few days, and he was off and running. Today, the amount of his online ordering business is staggering, which proves just how right I was five years ago. Like your website, your online ordering needs to meet customers where they are. I can go to Amazon, click one button and buy something, so there’s no reason I can’t go to every pizzeria’s website and order my food. And your online ordering needs to be a system you control, not one of the third-party vendors. Recently, I spoke with a restaurant that was using a thirdparty delivery platform through their website and had been doing so for three years. Guess what they didn’t have? One single customer’s information. All of that data went into a system they had no access to—or, technically, the rights to, per their agreement. Online ordering is a gold mine for gathering customer data. It will also take a lot of pressure off your phones and employees at the counter while increasing the average check size due to online upsells.

SEPTEMBER 2026 | PMQ.COM

What I love the most about marketing in 2026 is that a one-location pizzeria has the same opportunity as Papa Johns.

Point-of-Sales System

As with having a website, I once assumed every pizzeria used a POS system, but, unfortunately, as I’ve learned from some of my clients, that’s not the case. A while back, I visited Capuano’s Pizza House in Pataskala, Ohio, and spent some time with owners Ashlee Powell and Heather Schmidt. They took over this pizzeria in 42

PMQ PIZZA | PMQ.COM

E S

You need one central place to house all of your customer data. Most of you have customer info in your POS system, online ordering system, email system and loyalty program, but not all of it is stored in one place. Why do you need a single

Social Media

“I don’t use social media,” a client told me. “I depend on word-of-mouth.” I would have accepted that 20 years ago, but not today. Today, 60% of our time is spent online, much of it on social media. In 2004, that number was 9%. Today, word-of-mouth is through Facebook and Instagram. If you don’t have an active, up-to-date profile, you are losing out on the best word-of-mouth. More than three-quarters (77%) of U.S. adults use social media, and 44% report visiting a restaurant for the first time due to social media. Look around your restaurant—what is everyone doing? Next time you’re at a stoplight, look around. Wherever you go, people are on their phones. And the majority of the time, they are on social media. It shouldn’t be a question of whether you use social media; rather, are you doing it right?

Customer Database Software

L A R O CC A P I Z Z A

This post by LaRocca’s Pizza in Topeka, Kansas, generated modern-day word of mouth with nearly 1,000 likes and 200 shares.

early 2023, and one of the first things they did was install a POS+POM system. Why? Because the restaurant had always been run the oldfashioned way. On Friday nights, I was told, they’d process 200 orders with pen and paper, which made the place a madhouse. Once they added a POS, life became much easier: They gained more capacity, can easily gather customer data, and dramatically lowered the number of incorrect orders. In addition to bringing them into this century, it gave them a vision for opening more stores in the future.

Loyalty Program

Your best customers will buy from you more often, spend more and come in for extra visits when you promote to them. However, that requires a loyalty program. Solid loyalty programs will represent about 20% of your customer base, but these customers are the best ones. In recent years, with food costs rising, loyalty programs have seen an upward trend. (Surprisingly, one of the fastest-growing audiences for loyalty programs are people age 55 and older, since they tend to be more money-conscious.) Having a program that gives you the best customers to target for one-off promotions is the ultimate sales lever. But, as I’ve mentioned in past articles on PMQ.com, you’d better have sales training in place to ensure you build your membership. Your loyalty program can be like a Ferrari—but, like all cars, Ferraris need gas. Adding new customers ensures that your program never runs out of gas. Matt Plapp is a columnist for PMQ.com and the CEO of America’s Best Restaurants, where he has worked with thousands of restaurants since 2008.

A D O B E STO C K / F I Z K ES

database? Because you never know which piece of that puzzle will go away and, with it, valuable customer data. For many of you, the best place to store this information is in an email marketing platform. Why? So you can ensure that every customer receives your emails. These platforms will also remove and combine duplicate emails. Here’s an important database hack: In your POS and online ordering system, you need to have a way to identify bigger-ticket customers who use your restaurant for business purposes. I commonly find great B2B contacts collecting cobwebs inside these systems. In 2023, one of our clients took this advice and combed through his larger checks. He then called those customers and sold them gift card bundles for Christmas. He made 12 phone calls and sold $15,000 in gift cards to businesses.

Mind the Gaps

Restaurant consultant Matt Plapp says he has spoken to many restaurant owners in recent months, “and a few conversations really scared me,” particularly in regard to “major gaps in their tech stack.” Here are some alarming problems he encountered: 20-location pizza chain: The Facebook link on their

website was linked to another restaurant, and it had been that way for over a year.

1-location pizzeria: No website; they simply use Toast

online ordering.

2-location pizzeria: No website; their explanation was, “We have a Facebook page.” 4-location pizzeria: No online ordering and still taking

phone orders with pen and paper.

1-location pizzeria: No social media; their explanation

was, “We depend on word-of-mouth.”

10-location pizzeria: No customer database. “We don’t

collect customer data,” they explained. “We’ve been around for 50-plus years. Everyone knows us.”

“Seriously, people, it’s 2026,” Plapp adds. “Let’s start acting like it!”

SEPTEMBER 2026 | PMQ.COM

Wayfarer’s THE

TALE

Taking inspiration from not one but three pizza styles, Mike Dew has chosen the path less traveled for Wayfarer Tavern in small-town Kentucky. BY TRACY MORIN

HAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU BLEND Detroit pizza’s caramelized edges with the “party cut” of the Midwest, plus the thin, sturdy crust of the classic bar pie? For Wayfarer Tavern owner Mike Dew, it all adds up to the style of pizza he designed to unleash on Dayton, Kentucky, a town of less than 6,000 just across the Ohio River from Cincinnati. And, thanks to Dew’s keen marketing and branding savvy, customers have proven more than ready to receive it.

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(Left to right) Executive chef Mikey Fabian, general manager Henry Burgin and owner Mike Dew head up the Wayfarer Tavern team.

Mastering a Style Mashup

When Dew started experimenting with pizza making, he first attempted the Detroit style, which was then-nonexistent in his area. “I fell in love with that crispy, cheesy crust edge after being introduced to it in 2011—in Austin, Texas, of all places, at the original Via 313 trailer,” Dew recalls. “But, as I began exploring pizza for a restaurant setting, I wanted something a little more production-friendly. What could I make that still captured what I loved about Detroit style?” Dew also noticed that the Chicago tavern style was attracting attention in the pizza world, but he desired a more hydrated crust—while gravitating toward the Midwestern “party cut.” “As I investigated what ‘bar-style pizza’ or ‘tavern-style pizza’ or ‘party cut’ pizza really was, I saw a trend,” he says. “What I like to call the ‘Bar-Style Pizza Belt’ emerged—it basically starts in Milwaukee and moves south and east across the country through Chicago, St. Louis, Dayton and Columbus, Ohio, over to New Jersey and up to the Boston South Shore. “Taking all these different ideas into consideration, plus my desire to include the crispy Detroit-style cheese edge, resulted in the Wayfarer Tavern dough recipe, bake method and square cut we have today,” Dew continues. “Our actual crust base is more of a traditional East Coast style; we don’t cure our dough and aim for a very specific texture and color in our bake.” Fortunately, Dew’s pre-pizza background prepared him for both risk taking and business building. As a graphic designer, he’d handled branding, packaging and experiential design. “I learned how to develop ideas through the creative 46

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process, how to not be afraid to break rules but always have a rationale for doing so, and how to take constructive feedback in the process,” Dew says. “It’s both an art and a science: Design layouts are all based on proportion, hierarchy and size calculations. Dough is bread, and bread is very much based on science, but then the toppings become a matter of creativity, perspective and taste.” Dew also spent time in the tech startup world, exposed to how businesses operate, building culture from scratch, learning to think like a business owner, and understanding what kind of leader he wanted and needed to be. His initial restaurant experience—doing design and marketing for friends and partners in The Lang Thang Group—taught Dew about operations, food costing and labor management; the differences and similarities between restaurant team culture and office team culture; and restaurant marketing, social media and handling reviews. And he watched the entire restaurant industry evolve through the pandemic. While Dew’s background and pizza recipe felt rock-solid, would Dayton, Kentucky, be ready for this unusual pizza

“The spirit of collaboration requires letting go a little bit, but it takes things to places you might never expect, and that’s what makes it exciting.” Mike Dew, Wayfarer Tavern

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“I consistently need to remind myself to be unashamed to tell people about Wayfarer Tavern, on any platform or in any environment—building some brand awareness in real life.” Mike Dew, Wayfarer Tavern

Wayfarer’s hybrid pizza—with Detroit-style edges, bar pies’ thin crust and a Chicago tavern-style square cut—receives a creative upgrade with toppings like potato chips, rapini and truffle oil.

hybrid and an outside-the-box restaurant owner? “I don’t know if Wayfarer Tavern happens here five to 10 years ago,” Dew admits. “And, 20 years ago, if you had told me I was going to open a pizza place in my mid-40s, I would have been both surprised and ecstatic.”

From Home Cooking to Historic Brick-and-Mortar

Before he opened Wayfarer Tavern in January 2025, Dew hosted pizza parties at home—“to scratch my Detroit-style pizza cravings itch,” he says. Over time, his craft improved, and eventually the stars aligned: He was laid off at work while putting together a pop-up at one of The Lang Thang Group’s restaurants. “It was time to make the jump,” Dew says. “One of my partners encouraged me to explore the 48

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pop-up, and from there I was able to develop the hybrid tavern pizza style that we serve today.” After his first pop-up, Dew started orchestrating small-run pizza sales out of his house to keep his name top of mind and play with possible topping ideas for the restaurant he envisioned. “A lot of pizzas on the menu today came out of this experimental time,” he notes. “While the restaurant was being built, we took the show on the road and held some pop-ups at a bar just down the street from us. The first pop-up at that location, we sold 100 pizzas in less than an hour. They took much longer than that to get out to guests, but it was a great butt-kicking and learning experience.” For his brick-and-mortar location, Dew found a prime spot on a main-drag corner. Known as the Burton Building, it’s listed on the National Register of Historic Places and previously housed a city hall, movie theater, hardware store, Pythian Temple and the first Kroger supermarket in Northern Kentucky. The building needed some work to become restaurant-ready, but the developing neighborhood hinted at a promising future. Dew wanted to create a particular environment at Wayfarer Tavern—one not available elsewhere in the area. “We’re going for an elevated but relaxed experience, someplace people feel excited to go on a date night or to celebrate an anniversary, but also someplace you’d enjoy just popping into on a random Tuesday night,” he says. “A lot of things go into that, from smart and welcoming service to the music and lighting. Those are non-negotiable things for me that maybe other restaurants don’t view as a priority.” The menu helps fortify that welcoming hangout vibe with fun shareables, oyster specials, the Aperitivo Hour (a happy hour to boost slower periods), seasonal specials and rotating gelato from a local maker, all of which entice guests back. “A lot of talk in the online pizza-verse says, ‘Make your menu small—do four things and do them really well,’ and there’s nothing wrong with that,” Dew says. “But our place is so dine-in experience-focused, that kind of minimalism doesn’t really work for us. Our menu is still 1,000% pizza-driven, but it’s all really balanced.”

Brilliant Branding

With Dew’s background in design and marketing, his branding approach at Wayfarer is multifaceted. Well-designed merch gives guests an opportunity to rep their favorite pizza place through hats, sweatshirts and T-shirts for sale, plus free postcards and branded matchbooks. Dew even designed a custom-scented candle, featured in Wayfarer’s bathrooms, that guests can purchase for home. Collaborations are also a key part of the excitement and marketing at Wayfarer. “We have a special singlebarrel bourbon from New Riff Distilling with our branding on it,” Dew says. “Later this year, we will be visiting Waylan Wine Co. in California to collaborate on a special wine that we will carry with a custom label.” Meanwhile, pizza collabs— partnering with local chefs and restaurants to create limited-time specialty pies—arose from Dew simply following other restaurants on social media. “Pizza is a great canvas for all sorts of toppings and combinations; it just made sense to reach out to other folks in town to see if they’d be interested in participating, and it was an easy sell,” he says. “Restaurant people are creative, and I wanted to provide an opportunity to try some new things in a low-risk environment. I hoped it would be well-received, but the response was greater than I ever expected.” For other operators aiming for collabs with local businesses, Dew advises letting go of control—at least somewhat. “Along with being creatives, restaurant people also tend to want to do everything themselves, because that’s what the job usually demands,” he says. “The spirit of collaboration requires letting go a little bit, but it takes things to places you might never expect, and that’s what makes it exciting. Also, be as organized and plan as far ahead as possible. That way, when

the event is happening, things will be less chaotic, and you can focus on the event at hand.” The Collab Series has evolved into Wayfarer’s signature event, but Dew notes, “Everything we do is a marketing opportunity—digital or analog. We run Google Ads. We have a dedicated email list that we contact three to four times per month and send SMS text messages. We focus mainly on Instagram for social media, but we maintain a Facebook presence for news and updates. We regularly refresh our Google and Apple Maps profiles. We have a quarterly marketing and events calendar lined up. We have wine and spirits events. We rotate our pizza specials bimonthly and our salads and other items quarterly. And we do community events from time to time, like Negroni Week or Cincinnati Pizza Week.” Dew, who considers his role akin to CMO (in addition to CEO and COO), admits he’s “really locked in to running the marketing side of the restaurant.” But some aspects are not always second nature. “I consistently need to remind myself to be unashamed to tell people about Wayfarer Tavern, on any platform or in any environment—building some brand awareness in real life,” Dew says. “We do a lot of things, but looking ahead, there’s a lot to be excited about.” Tracy Morin is PMQ’s associate editor.

SEPTEMBER 2026 | PMQ.COM

P H OTO S P R O V I D E D (2)

TIPS FROM THE TEAM

Mike Pitera and Sean Dempsey are the newest additions to a growing list of USPT members serving as ambassadors for leading pizza industry suppliers.

Why Big Brands Bet On USPT Ambassadors It all starts by building relationships with brands that share your core values, one team member says. BY BRIAN HERNANDEZ

ALK THE FLOOR AT the Pizza Tomorrow Summit or any major pizza event, and you’ll notice that some of the busiest people aren’t necessarily the ones competing. They’re teaching classes, demonstrating products, answering technical questions, developing recipes or helping another operator troubleshoot a problem that’s been driving them crazy for months. More often than not, those people wear a U.S. Pizza Team (USPT) logo somewhere on their chef coat. That’s no coincidence. Over the years, a growing number of USPT members have become brand ambassadors for some of the pizza industry’s biggest names. This year alone, Mike Pitera of Pizza a Modo Mio expanded his role with DeIorio Foods as executive chef and brand ambassador. Meanwhile, Sean Dempsey of Dempsey’s Brewery Pub & Restaurant joined the California 50

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Milk Advisory Board (CMAB) as a Real California Milk chef ambassador as well as representing Performance Food Group and Shamrocks & Edelweiss. They join a growing list of USPT members serving as brand ambassadors throughout the industry, including USPT culinary coach Vitangelo Recchia of Bella Napoli Pizzeria & Restaurant in Port Charlotte, Florida, who represents Marra Forni and Pizza University & Culinary Arts Center; Jon Garland of Saccone’s Pizza in Austin, Texas, who works with Lisanti Foods and PizzaCloud; Michael “Wolf ” Athanasopoulos of The Lamb & the Wolf, an ambassador for Galbani Professionale and Devanco Foods; and Gino Rago, Lenny Rago and Bruno Brunetti of Panino’s Pizzeria, who have represented Galbani Professionale, Margherita Meats and other industry brands for years.

TIPS FROM THE TEAM

Different brands may sell different products, but they all seem to be looking for the same type of person: someone who has earned the respect of fellow operators and enjoys helping others grow and improve. For Mike Pitera, the opportunity started with solving his own problem. After moving from New York to South Carolina and opening a food truck, he needed a dough program that could keep up with his growing business. That search led him to DeIorio Foods long before the company ever became a USPT sponsor. “I developed a relationship with them about four years ago,” Pitera says. “I was making my own dough when I moved to Charleston. I didn’t have a kitchen then. I needed some help, so I found DeIorio. From building that relationship, we eventually built one with the U.S. Pizza Team, leading to DeIorio sponsoring the team. They saw the value of working with talented pizzaioli from across the country.” Today, Pitera demonstrates DeIorio products at trade shows, consulting with pizzerias and helping operators improve everything from dough consistency to overall kitchen operations. “It’s exciting to be able to help a business become better at something I love to do,” Pitera says. “I get to share what I’ve learned from fellow pizzaioli, my teammates on the USPT and others from across the country. Now I have the opportunity to pass those experiences along and teach others the same way I was taught.” As Pitera expanded to multiple locations, he realized great recipes weren’t enough if every store couldn’t produce the same product every day. So the relationship with DeIorio has proven crucial for Pizza a Modo Mio in that respect. “In order for me to grow, I need consistency, and I want to be able to trust that everything is being done right with all of my locations,” Pitera says. “I can’t be at four locations at the same time.” Sean Dempsey’s path to becoming a Real California Milk chef ambassador followed a different route but reached the same destination. After building relationships through CMAB events and competitions, he was invited to join the ambassador squad earlier this year. His responsibilities include trade show appearances, recipe and content development, and helping operators better understand California dairy products. For Dempsey, however, the opportunity isn’t simply about representing a brand. It’s about continuing to learn. “I think it will give me a better, more fully versed understanding of everything cheese,” he says. “Creating more [digital] content is going to make me a better creator, and it’s going to help me become fully immersed in California cheese.” He also hopes the experience will allow him to bring more knowledge back to fellow operators and teammates.

“Don’t chase titles. Chase excellence. If you become known for your integrity, your consistency and your willingness to elevate others, the opportunities will eventually find you.” Vitangelo Recchia, Bella Napoli Pizzeria & Restaurant

Dempsey’s advice to operators hoping to earn similar opportunities is refreshingly simple. Don’t start by asking for sponsorships. Build relationships first. “You should start by sorting out which brands align with your core values,” he advises. “When you post, tag the company. When you’re at trade shows, find their booth and try to make some connections. Another great option is competing. It’s a lot easier to get your name out in the pizza world if you are at these competitions and making those connections.” As an ambassador for Marra Forni and instructor at Pizza University & Culinary Arts Center, pizza education is something USPT culinary coach Vitangelo Recchia has built an entire career around. Recchia believes too many operators chase recipes when they should be learning principles. “My role is to help operators understand the entire pizza system— SEPTEMBER 2026 | PMQ.COM

P H OTO S P R O V I D E D ( 3 )

TIPS FROM THE TEAM

Lenny Rago (right), a brand rep for Galbani Professionale and Margherita, chats with fellow Galbani rep and USPT captain Tore Trupiano of Mangia e Bevi.

“[To get a brand’s attention,] start by sorting out which brands align with your core values. When you post, tag the company. When you’re at trade shows, find their booth and try to make some connections.” Sean Dempsey, Dempsey’s Brewery Pub & Restaurant

how flour, fermentation, dough temperature, workflow, baking and equipment all work together,” he says. “An oven is just a tool. Without understanding the process behind it, even the best equipment can only take you so far.” That philosophy shapes every class he teaches. Rather than asking students to duplicate his pizza, Recchia wants them to understand why pizza behaves the way it does. “My goal isn’t for someone to leave saying, ‘I can make Vitangelo’s pizza.’ It’s for them to leave saying, ‘Now I understand my own pizza.’ To me, that’s real education.” When asked what advice he’d give operators hoping to become ambassadors themselves, Recchia’s answer had very little to do with becoming an ambassador at all. “Don’t chase titles. Chase excellence,” he says. “If you become known for your integrity, your consistency and your willingness to elevate others, the opportunities will eventually find you.” That mindset also explains why so many USPT members continue to be sought after by manufacturers and suppliers throughout the industry. Whether they’re representing 52

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USPT member Jon Garland shares his expertise through partnerships with Lisanti Foods and PizzaCloud.

Michael “Wolf” Athanasopoulos serves as an ambassador for Galbani Professionale and Devanco Foods.

dough, cheese, ovens, ingredients, software or distribution partners, the common thread is a willingness to teach, learn and give back to the pizza community. According to James Viti, vice president of marketing and product development for DeIorio Foods, the qualities that make someone a successful competitor are often the same qualities that make them an effective ambassador. “We’re looking for ambassadors who bring more than name recognition,” Viti says. “Mike Pitera represents everything we value in a partner. He’s a respected educator who’s earned the trust of operators, and when he recommends a product, it comes from real-world experience. That’s why U.S. Pizza Team members are so valuable. They use these products every day, compete at the highest levels and are constantly pushing the craft of pizza forward. For us, it’s a partnership built on expertise, innovation and trust.” Regardless of the logo on the chef ’s coat, the job description remains remarkably similar. The best ambassadors aren’t there to deliver a sales pitch. They’re there to answer questions, solve problems, teach techniques and help fellow operators become more successful. That’s something USPT members were already doing long before anyone ever called them brand ambassadors. Brian Hernandez is PMQ’s associate editor and director of the U.S. Pizza Team.

For more information about the U.S. Pizza Team, its members and sponsors, visit USPizzaTeam.com.

The 2026 Galbani Professionale Pizza Cup

Your road to Italy starts here. Whether you’re an experienced competitor or entering your first event, the 2026 Galbani Professionale Pizza Cup is your chance to compete for championships, cash prizes and a trip to Italy. Join PMQ’s U.S. Pizza Team in Orlando and prove your skills against some of the best pizza makers in North America. Two Champions Will Win Trips to Italy! The champions of Pizza in the Pan and Freestyle Acrobatics will each earn a trip to Italy to represent themselves and the United States while competing on the international stage.

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By Tracy Morin (Clockwise from top left) Brian Mednicov works a summer event with his aunt and uncle, previous owners Marla and Mike Bagan; Steve Carlson and Gary Mednicov celebrate 10 years at their flagship location in Hoffman Estates; Gary’s daughter, Susan, makes pizza with Carlson in the early ’80s; Gary Mednicov and two employees work a concession tent at a carnival in the mid-’80s.

S TA T E O F I L L

Garibaldi’s Italian Eatery

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scheduling software; we didn’t do any inventory, period,” Brian says. “Now, we have systems to help with our invoicing, budgeting and food costing. I’ve moved heavily into technology since I started.” For Brian, who still fondly recalls helping his dad in the pizzeria, the hard work has paid off as his business continues to create pizza memories for generations of families. “So many people come in and say their parents brought them when they were kids, and now their kids are having their first slice of pizza,” he says. “When the kids have the biggest smile on their face and say, ‘This is the best pizza I’ve ever had,’ that’s what makes everything worth it. “It’s going to be stressful when we’re working sometimes, but whether it’s our partners, our suppliers, our customers or our staff, I just want Garibaldi’s to be a great experience for everyone,” Brian continues. “I always want to make our staff smile, watch our guests smile. This is a hard business, and it’s not worth it unless we’re having fun.”

S TA

When Gary Mednicov, who’d worked at a pizzeria in Boston before attending culinary school, moved to Chicago, he spotted a gap in the market: no East Coast-style pizza by the slice. He opened Garibaldi’s Italian Eatery in 1976 to serve that need, running the business with Steve Carlson (who’s still vice president today) until passing it to his brother, Mike Bagan, in 2011. “My father always had a passion for food,” says Gary’s son Brian, who assumed operations in May 2026. “He claims that he was the first to offer pizza by the slice in Chicago, and I haven’t heard of anyone doing it before us.” As the business celebrates 50 years, Brian, who also sports a culinary school education and years of hands-on experience in the pizzeria, is dedicated to updating operations. Now with two stores— in Hoffman Estates and Arlington Heights, Illinois—Garibaldi’s had once grown to six locations, and Brian plans to expand once again while shrinking the expansive menu. He’s introducing new employee benefits, including a 401(k) policy and paid time off, and systems have been upgraded from an antiquated POS system to modern-day tech, both in-store and for its three concession stands. “We had no

Tracy Morin is PMQ’s associate editor.

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