Story by Rick Hynum / Photos by Simply Madison Photography
There’s a certain Willy Wonka-esque quality to Berwick Pizza—minus, of course, the Oompa-Loompas and the booby traps for “bad kids.” Located in tiny Green Camp, Ohio, and owned by Todd and Brenda Buckland and their son, Austin, it looks like an ordinary pizzeria from the outside. But step through the door, and you’ll enter a magical realm of whimsy and ingenuity, where every customer’s dream pizza comes to life. And unlike Willy himself, there’s no sense of potential menace lurking behind the Bucklands’ cheerful smiles—just a passion for wildly inventive pizzas that make customers’ taste buds do a double-take.
The building itself has been a pizza shop since the mid-1960s. “It went through a few owners,” Austin says. “My parents purchased it in 2007—no restaurant experience, nothing. My dad had worked at Honda for many years, so he just jumped into it. I was eight years old when they bought it. So I’ve grown up here, and it’s always been a family affair.”
And a family-friendly one, too. Spending time with the Bucklands is like chilling with your favorite cousins, if your favorite cousins are culinary wizards who specialize in dessert pizzas topped with Fruity Pebbles, strawberry Pop-Tarts and Little Debbie Christmas Tree Cakes, not to mention savory pies loaded with Nashville hot chicken, mac and cheese and crab Rangoon. “We didn’t just set out thinking, ‘Hey, we’re going to start making weird pizzas,’” Austin recalls. “We kind of just walked into it, and everything fell into place.”
Related: Much Ado About Pizza: The tale behind a ‘terrible idea’ that ends well
Today, Berwick Pizza draws customers from across Ohio and, thanks to an influencer’s video that went viral on TikTok, from 28 other states as well. All of that in a town with a population of about 300, located a full hour from the nearest major city, Columbus.
But few restaurateurs, if any, do pizza quite like the Bucklands.
Getting Weirder and Weirder
When Todd and Brenda bought Berwick Pizza, they were restaurant novices. But Todd knew how to run a business, thanks to his experience as senior manager of manufacturing at the Honda Auto Plant in Marysville. “We have very good pizza, very creative things, but you have to have a good business sense,” Todd says. “To be successful, that’s even more important than the food side of it.”
Offering a unique selling proposition makes good business sense, too, although it wasn’t easy at first. Berwick Pizza already offered three fairly standard dessert pizzas but started the more innovative Pizza of the Month program in 2016, at the suggestion of Matt Meyer, Todd and Brenda’s son-in-law. “He would try unusual recipes with different sauces and combinations that pushed the envelope,” Austin says. “We eventually realized that our customers might love them just as much as we did.”
Those pizzas weren’t exactly a hit from the get-go. “Launching the program was something that we went back and forth on a little bit at the beginning, for the simple reasons of the time and money that went into creating them,” Austin says. “Some of our hurdles were carrying special ingredients that we don’t typically stock and finding the right amount to source when we didn’t yet know how well a recipe would perform.”
The early monthly specials weren’t all that wacky—think Philly cheesesteak, Sloppy Joe, and mac and cheese pies. Initially, customers showed little interest, but the Bucklands didn’t give up. “We thought we needed to expand on the dessert pizzas,” Austin says. “After Matt left in 2017, I took over the Pizza of the Month. I’m a sweets guy, and I just started getting a little weirder and weirder with them as we went on.”
Related: Pizza Princess G: The Taylor Swift of pizza takes Twitch by storm
A dessert pizza topped with Fruity Pebbles proved to be a game changer. “That was the first one that really caught people’s attention,” Austin reflects. “That was way out of the box, way different than a lot of people had ever seen before. It was so popular that we brought it back as a pizza of the month from time to time until we finally put it on our regular menu.”
That same year, Berwick Pizza introduced the popular Pumpkin Pie Pizza, made with pumpkin pie filling, strudel and whipped cream, and the Gingerbread Dessert Pizza. Now the Bucklands were off and running, with a license to be as weird as they wanna be.
Nerds, Bubble Gum and Fortune Cookies
So which dessert pizzas have popped, and which ones have fizzled? “There have absolutely been clear winners and losers,” Austin says. Fan favorites include the Cosmic Brownie, Death by Chocolate and Pumpkin Donut. “Fruity Pebbles was also a bestseller, although it managed to spark a small controversy over whether it belonged on pizza or not,” Austin says. “Nobody marched at us with pitchforks or anything, but it managed to get a few Facebook warriors quite upset. Sometimes that kind of discussion helps to promote us, though, so it’s all good.”
After all, if it tastes good on a pizza, it belongs on a pizza. Still, Austin admits, “Some flavors are love-it-or-hate-it. Nerds, Key Lime Pie and Pop Rocks on pizza apparently fall into that category. When you take risks, sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t.”
Then there’s the Christmas Tree Cake, featuring a sweet cream filling, smashed Little Debbie cakes, streusel, icing and sprinkles. “We did it for the first time last December, and it set the record pretty high for our bestselling pizza of the month,” Austin notes. It was so popular, the Bucklands brought it back for a monthlong Christmas in July promotion this year.
Related: Queen of the feast: Lizz Aquarian’s buffet concept is like a ‘7-day-a-week test kitchen’
The Nerds pizza, on the other hand, only seemed like a good idea at the time. “That was a crazy one,” Austin says. “It tasted really good. If you like Nerds, it was the perfect pizza for you. But compared to our usual numbers, it was a flop. If you don’t like Nerds, you’re not gonna like it on a pizza.”
Other dessert recipes never made it past the trial stage, such as an Asian-inspired fortune cookie pizza, which followed a sweet-and-sour chicken (non-dessert) pizza that customers loved. “I thought that would be great,” Austin recalled. “And I did try it, but when you think about it, there’s not much flavor to a fortune cookie.”
Cotton candy and bubble gum flavors haven’t worked out either, he added. For the latter, “I’ve tried bubble gum flavoring in the dough, different fillings, different streusels, toppings, all of that. Maybe one day we’ll get it. That one just keeps coming back to haunt me right now. The problem is, the bubble gum flavor tends to bake out entirely, which is interesting.”
Going Viral
Austin and his family are rarely short on ideas for new specialty pizzas, but why do all the thinking themselves? They ramped up the menu madness in May by letting their employees conjure up their own dream pies. That promotion led to dessert pizzas like Kylie’s Apple Cinnamon Roll, Hannah’s Twix, Patience’s Hot Chocolate-Covered Banana, Kenzley’s Strawberry Pop Tart, and Jayda’s Coffee Lava Cake. Each pizza was featured for a week on Facebook and Instagram, with prizes—such as gift cards and a paid shift off—based on total sales.
Even better, the employees became marketers for the restaurant, drumming up local support to help them win the contest. One determined employee made posters for her pie, and her mother placed them around her workplace, a local factory. “She taped them up in the break rooms, the bathrooms, on the walls and in hallways everywhere,” Austin says. “So they got a group order together [that] totaled 20 chocolate-covered pizzas. She had friends and family come in, and we had people say, ‘Hey, I didn’t even know you guys were out here. I saw this flier taped in the break room, so I just had to come and try it.’ That kind of took the competition to another level.”
In 2023, the Bucklands created the themed Berwick Box, featuring three specialty pizzas in a single box. The Monster Mash Box, for example, scared up business with new pies like the Cherry Zombie, the Peanut Butter & Jelly Ghost and the Chocolate Bat. A few months later, the Snack Cake Box featured Nutty Bar, Oatmeal Crème and Swiss Creme pizzas, while Flavors of the Street Fair boxes came with the Gyro, Street Taco and Deep-Fried Cheesecake pizzas. This past January, they debuted a Pizza of the Month Loyalty Card—customers who buy all 12 monthly pizzas in 2024 will win a $25 gift card, but to get the loyalty card for free, they had to buy that month’s Cocoa Pebbles dessert pizza.
Related: Boardwalk vibes: With this unique pizza style, life’s a beach on the Jersey Shore
Perhaps their biggest coup for 2024, however, was reeling in influencer Dereck Malone, known as Sniping for Dom on TikTok and Instagram. Chalk that one up to Austin, who tracked down and pitched the Ohio-based restaurant reviewer on Berwick Pizza. “I had found his contact info and sent him an email, not really knowing if I would hear back or not, but it turned out really nice,” Austin says. “There was quite a lot of back-and-forth over the course of a few weeks to make sure it was something that lined up with his channel and something he would be interested in. And he was really interested because of all the eye-catching stuff that we do.”
Malone, who has more than 877,600 followers on TikTok alone, visited Berwick Pizza with his son, Dom. “We’re going crazy over everything, so we just got lots of things,” Dom enthused to the camera. The feast included the Buffalo Chicken Dip, the Crab Rangoon, the Mac & Cheese Pulled Pork, the Spaghetti Pizza and the Fruity Pebbles. “These things are crazy-good!” Malone exclaimed. “The crust is great on them, too.”
The review boosted business for Berwick Pizza “almost instantly,” Austin notes. “It posted on a Wednesday, between 8 and 9 a.m.,” he recalls. “By noon, I think it was at, like, 60,000 views. [Malone] called me and was, like, ‘Hey, just from my experience of watching how these things usually go, I think it’s going to hit a million…I’m just telling you to get ready, be prepared.’”
Malone, as it turned out, underestimated the performance of the June 5 video; it has since topped 3.5 million plays on TikTok. It was so successful, the Bucklands later collaborated with the influencer on several specialty pizzas—including a Jolly Rancher pizza, a Skittles pizza and a taco pizza featuring Doritos—as well as a meet-and-greet with Malone and his family at the restaurant in August.
“Social media has been the key to all of this [success],” Austin says. “Without that, nobody knows we’re here. If they do know we’re here, they forget that we’re here. Social media is just a constant reminder to customers when we’re getting new pizzas out there. The [Sniping for Dom collaboration] really proved that. That’s why we reached out to him. But it blew our expectations out of the water—how much impact one little thing like that could have.”
Ultimately, though, Berwick Pizza has catapulted to success on the strength of a menu that tests the boundaries of what pizza can be. “These were the craziest pizzas we’ve ever seen in our life!” Malone declared in a follow-up TikTok video. Willy Wonka would doubtlessly agree—and approve.
