Pizza people helping pizza people—that’s what the Pizza Community is all about. And it doesn’t matter if they’re competing for the same slice of their customers’ dining budgets.
Both Certified Pies and Different Dough Pizza Co., two independent Little Rock, Arkansas shops, made TV news—and enjoyed a huge surge in business—recently when the owners of the former provided badly needed dough to the latter, and the latter’s owner returned the favor by helping in the former’s kitchen during a busy Friday rush.
According to KATV, it happened last week, culminating on Friday, March 7, a day promoted by some activists as an “economic blackout” targeting large corporations nationwide. Both locally owned pizzerias apparently reaped the benefits of that campaign and found themselves unexpectedly struggling to meet customer demand.
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Faced with a dough shortage, Different Dough Pizza Co. owner Brian Krikorian got a helping hand from Certified Pies’ owners, who generously contributed what Krikorian needed to keep the pies coming out of the oven.
Then, on the evening of March 7, Krikorian dropped in at Certified Pies at a most opportune moment: The pizzeria was overwhelmed and understaffed. “He literally saw us kind of drowning and looked at me and said, ‘How can I help?’” Samantha Stewart recalled in an interview with KATV. Krikorian immediately headed into Certified Pies’ kitchen and started helping make pizza. “It was lifesaving,” Samantha said. “He was amazing.”
“It was all hands on deck that day, and [Krikorian] just so happened to…walk in at the time,” Kreg Stewart, Samantha’s husband and business partner, told KATV. “So it was a blessing.”
The Stewarts later thanked Krikorian in a social media post and urged their followers to spend some money at Different Dough. And business went crazy there, too, throughout the weekend. Suddenly, Krikorian said, “My Friday becomes my second busiest Friday I’ve ever had. My Saturday becomes the busiest Saturday I’ve ever had. And the only better Sunday I had was Super Bowl Sunday.”
Certified Pies, founded by the Stewarts and their friend, Harlem Wilson, opened as Little Rock’s first Black-owned pizzeria in Fall 2023 after starting out as a ghost kitchen during the pandemic. According to Stacker, the restaurant is ranked No. 5 among Little Rock’s highest-rated pizza shops based on Yelp reviews. Certified Pies is known for collaborating with other minority-owned businesses in Little Rock and featuring locally made products on its menu.
Krikorian’s parents owned a pizzeria in Bryant, Arkansas. “I was born on a Monday,” he told the Arkansas Times last year. “By Friday night, Mom was out of the hospital, and I was under the counter”—specifically, sleeping in a car seat beneath the restaurant’s cash register. After growing up and traveling across the U.S. to try different pizza styles, Krikorian earned his certification from the International School of Pizza and opened Different Dough Pizza Co. in July 2023 with his wife, Raechel. The two even held their wedding in the pizzeria prior to its grand opening.
So both pizzerias opened during the same year in the same city, and the owners are true believers in supporting local businesses—including each other’s.
“All small businesses should be here to support each other because we’re the ones who actually help drive the community to be a better place,” Krikorian told KATV. “Big corporations are fine, whatever, but small businesses are the backbone of the communities that we’re all involved in.”
Samantha Stewart agreed and pointed to the explosion in business for both pizzerias on the day of the economic blackout, especially when they worked together. “The community showed everyone that this is what they wanted to see,” she said in the KATV interview. “They wanted to see small businesses coming together and not playing the competition role like other big businesses do.”
