Pizza shop businesses count on neighborhood loyalty

That's a lot of dough: Some 41 percent of 1,500 Americans who responded to a survey by Technomic, a Chicago-based food-indsutry researcher, claimed they ate pizza at least once a week.

In 2010, that number was a lowly 26 percent.

It's a big boost for pizza restaurants, especially the national chains, who weren't doing all that well a few years ago. And it's great news for locally owned and operated pizza shops, many of whom depend on customer and neighborhood loyalty.

Jason Hunt, for example, drops his children at school and runs a couple errands before arriving at his business, Roscoe's Pizza at 212 Edgewood Road NW in Cedar Rapids, to begin the work day.

“I get in around 9-ish to clean and do a general list of things,” he says. “We usually make our dough in the morning.

“We cut it, weigh it, pan it and then we let it rise in the afternoon so that it is ready for our night business.”

Hunt, who has been in the pizza business for 10 years and an owner for the last 5, says his store is probably the only place in town that does a caramelized crust - that is, one where the cheese is spread all the way to the edge and then baked.

Their Brookville crust offers the best of two worlds, he said - a New York thin crust, but baked in a deep-dish pan with the caramelized cheese edge.

“A few years ago I had a family in here that always disagreed on what they wanted,” Hunt said. “One always wanted the New York thin crust and the other always wanted a pan-style with the caramelized crust, so their 10-year old son asked me why I didn't just mix the two into one pizza.

“I asked him how I would do that and he said I should put a thin dough in the pan and cheese it like our Motown crust, which is our deep dish-style pizza crust.”

As pizza crusts are frequently given a big-city name, the young customer even helped name the new creation.

“This little boy found the halfway point between some of our bigger cities here in the Midwest and New York City, and chose Brookville, Penn., so we now call it the Brookville and we've been selling a ton of them ever since.

Roscoe's markets through telephone book ads and coupon venues, but Hunt noted that a lot of his business comes from his established customers.

While Roscoe's hasn't moved into the gluten-free area of the market just yet, they are most willing to accommodate their customers.

“Sometimes some of my customers will bring in their own pre-made crust,” he said, “and I will gladly make a pizza for them using their crust, but I've never really researched to see if I could buy a gluten-free one.

“There's flour everywhere in this kitchen,” he added, “even in the oven. We'll bake their pizzas on parchment paper to try and prevent it from touching any of the flour.”

150 POUNDS

On a typical workday at Tomaso's Pizza, 3234 Center Point Road NE in Cedar Rapids, bakers will prepare some 150 pounds of dough.

“We start our dough every morning around 10 o'clock,” General Manager Nick Carfrae said. “We make it from scratch and we make it every day.

“All our spices that we use are purchased locally from Frontier Herbs down in Norway, Iowa, and we use only one kind of cheese, but it isn't a local product.

“We don't offer anchovies, but if somebody brought them in, I would throw them on a pizza for them. We do have a couple customers that have gluten allergies and they have brought in their own gluten-free crusts that we top and bake for them.”

“The thing about us,” Carfrae said, “is we're kind of old school. We don't want to spread ourselves too thin by adding a lot of new products.

“All we do here is pizza and we think we do pizza pretty good. That is where we make our money, and that is what we stick with.”

As far as marketing and advertising goes, Tomaso's relies on direct-mail to their customer base.

“Just like any other restaurant in Cedar Rapids, it is our return business that keeps us alive,” he said, “so those are the ones that we go toward.”

Getting the ovens fired up for the day is General Manager Tim Oathout's priority when he arrives in the morning at Zeppelin's Pizzeria, 5300 Edgewood Pizza, also in Cedar Rapids.

“We want to make sure we get the stones nice and hot, and then we start chopping vegetables and rolling out the dough we made the night before,” he explained.

The bakers leave their ovens on a little bit through the night - “not real high, but just enough to be sure the stones keep some heat so that when we come in at 9 in the morning and turn them back up, we can have them up and rolling for lunch carry outs,” Oathout said.

The ovens are kept between 550 and 600 degrees.

“Our pizzas take roughly around 8 minutes to actually cook,” he said.

“We do crust a little bit different. We do a thin cracker-style crust. You can pick up our pizza, and it holds a nice crisp, solid wedge that stands out.

“Many Midwestern-style pizzas tend to get thick and doughy and bend. It took a long time to get the crust to where we wanted it for the pizza we serve now.”

What kind of carryout numbers does Zeppelin's see?

“That's a little tough to say because of weather - the weather definitely plays a big part in how much pizza we are sending out,” Oathout said. “It could be 100 to 200 pizzas.”

All three shop operators were guarded about cheese suppliers, sauces and spices. They view the information as trade secrets.

“It is word-of-mouth for us right now and we've started to see a regular clientele in here a few times a week,” Oathout added. “We are still in that building process.”