By Charlie Pogacar
Each year, foodservice professionals flock to the shores of Lake Michigan to attend or take part in the National Restaurant Association Show. Hosted by the Association since 1919, the 2025 iteration of the trade show had an estimated attendance of over 50,000 people.
So why would a pizzeria operator attend a show like this? Motivations may vary—and we should add that Beyonce was playing neighboring Soldier Field on Saturday night—but, generally speaking, the Show is an opportunity to form relationships with vendors and other foodservice professionals.
“Our head of technology is here with us,” said Mike Burns, CEO of &pizza, explaining why he and nine other team members were at the trade show. “He is here looking at new technology, trying to gauge what’s up and coming. We hope to gain some marketing ideas, too. Justin [Smith, the brand’s VP of operations] is going to lead franchising for us [alongside SVP of Development and Franchise Sales Brett Willis], so we have a couple of prospects that are at the show we’d like to talk to—so it’s a little bit of everything.”
Here’s a look at just that: a little bit of everything from the 2025 National Restaurant Association Show. In particular, we want to highlight four vendors that caught PMQ’s eye—vendors you may be hearing a lot more from in the coming months.
A First-Party Solution?
Convenience is king when it comes to ordering food online. But nobody has to tell pizzeria operators that while apps like DoorDash and Uber Eats can help drive sales volume, the marketplaces’ fees can also eat into margins.
Sauce, a delivery and pickup platform, is hoping to change all that. The company is not trying to compete with DoorDash or Uber Eats—not directly, at least.
“Third party is a great acquisition tool,” Elliot Hool, VP of marketing at Sauce, told PMQ. “It’s a great way to bring in new customers. We’re just saying that after the fourth, fifth or sixth time [a customer orders your food via third-party], why not try and convert them? They’re already your customers, you know they love your food. [According to third-party aggregators’] own data, about 80% of the food that’s being ordered is the same customers ordering the same food from the same restaurants.”
Sauce offers an intriguing alternative: a flat-fee model for online ordering and delivery, which can reduce costs for restaurants with high-ticket orders or loyal customer bases, according to Hool. “The bigger the ticket, the better it is for the restaurant,” he said.
Sauce provides drivers, marketing support and a recently introduced AI-powered retention tool, according to Hool. The retention tool works to re-engage customers, including who haven’t ordered in a while.
If it sounds too good to be true, Hool said that’s exactly what Sauce is fighting against. He sympathizes with operators who have, for years, been sold a bill of goods by tech companies looking to reinvent the wheel. Similarly, consumers have grown accustomed to ordering via their favorite third-party platforms that promise reliable delivery times. So convincing them to gravitate back toward first-party channels, even if they are cheaper, isn’t exactly simple.
“The biggest issue is trust,” Hool noted. “Even customers know it’s better to order directly from the restaurant, but they don’t always feel comfortable doing so. They worry about how long it’ll take or whether the order will be handled properly.”
Sauce believes its model is particularly well suited for independent restaurants and small chains with established customer bases, rather than ghost kitchens or businesses that rely heavily on marketplace visibility.
When it comes to converting customers from third-party apps to a restaurant’s own system, Hool suggested a straightforward approach: Use in-store signage, social media or even flyers in takeout bags to raise awareness. “There’s no magic trick,” he said. “It’s about making customers aware and providing an experience that meets or exceeds their expectations.”
Does PizzaBot Have a New Focus?
If you’ve been to the International Pizza Expo, the Pizza Tomorrow Summit or the National Restaurant Association Show, you’ve probably seen the Lab2Fab PizzaBot in action. It’s an automated machine about the size of a commercial-sized refrigerator and can sauce and cheese a pizza in 35 seconds or less. Notably, this means the machine has gotten almost twice as fast as it was a year ago—at the 2024 Pizza Expo, it took about 60 seconds to complete the same task.
At the 2025 National Restaurant Association Show, attendees lined up to punch their orders into a digital kiosk and watched the PizzaBot build their pie. A pizza chef then placed it in a conveyor oven, cut it, boxed it up and placed it in a locker that could be opened via a digital code that had been generated when the diner ordered.
Related: Pizza Chain Set to Open First Fully Robotic Location in ‘Transformative Leap’ for QSR Industry
The PizzaBot keeps it simple: It tops a pizza with sauce, cheese and shredded or sliced pepperoni. “We try to focus on [a small number of] toppings,” said James Poole, chief technology and operations officer at Middleby. “If you wanted to add a bunch of toppings, [the machine] would get really big. Of course, you can have it top your pizzas and then take them offline and add vegetables. And you know you’re going to have the right amount of sauce and right amount of cheese—that drives profitability and quality because how you build a pizza dictates how well the pizza bakes.”
It’s notable, however, that the PizzaBot is only being used by three different operators across the U.S. According to Poole, one retail business—a grocery store chain—and two universities have PizzaBots in house. This is no surprise to Poole and his team, who view the machine as a way for nontraditional foodservice businesses to add a pizza program without adding team members.
“This is for people who have a core pizza that doesn’t vary all that much,” Poole said. “Independent pizzerias? Not so much. [The PizzaBot] is almost creating a pizza program [for a business] rather than enhancing it.”
This is in line with a pivot PMQ has noticed of late: Large-scale automation appears to be better suited for nontraditional environments, like hospitals, college campuses, airports and theme parks. These are places where the workforce is often green and temporary. An independent pizzeria or small chain, on the other hand, may favor smaller, more niche forms of automation that help supplement employee efficiency.
From Slingin’ Pies to Slingin’ Bumpy Paper
Before Brian Weavel became a regional sales manager for Perfect Crust Pizza Liners, he ran Anna’s Pizza & Pasta in Winnebago, Illinois. That means Weavel is intimately familiar with the day-to-day grind of running an independent pizzeria.
For nearly three years, Weavel has been selling Perfect Crust’s crust liners and to-go bags to pizza shops across the Midwest. That’s given him a new, high-level perspective on the pizza industry as a whole, where he notices different trends as they spread across his region. As a result, he views Detroit-style pizza as a huge opportunity. “I was obviously seeing it in Michigan, but now it’s moving further south,” Weavel said. “For our company, the big [rectangular] trays are going crazy. In Rockford [my hometown], I’m still not seeing Detroit-style, and I really think somebody needs to do that.”
There’s a different pizza style that is nearest and dearest to Weavel’s heart, though, and that is the little-known Rockford-style pizza. He said it could be mistaken for Chicago’s tavern-style pizza by the uninitiated, but the Rockford style has a few key tweaks that differentiate it.
“Rockford-style pizza is a little thicker than tavern-style,” Weavel said. “It’s more dense, it typically has a lot more toppings and a sweeter sauce. But now I’m seeing more of the Chicago tavern style [outside of Chicago] too.”
One COVID-induced change he’s seen a lot of shops making—even now—is trimming their menus down to focus on core offerings rather than trying to be everything to everyone. “Back when I was doing it, places would have a menu that’s five pages long—now you’re seeing stuff that’s more like two pages, and that makes sense,” Weavel said. “‘Keep it simple, stupid,’ right? I think you have to focus on what you are best at. If you have a great place—a sandwich place, a pizza place—trim down that menu and focus on what you’re really good at.”
Weavel is happy to see that most of the shops he talks with on a daily basis are ahead of nationwide benchmarks in terms of sales. Still, some of the smallest indie pizzerias are having trouble competing due to bloated food costs. So what advice would he give to shops that are struggling out there?
“The biggest thing I see now is that your customer is number one,” Weavel said. “In my little town, there were like three people, so it was easy to get to know everybody. But if you’re trying to expand or something like that, know your customer. Know what they want. Listen to that.”
All Roads Lead to Rome
One of the hottest pizza trends in the U.S. right now is Roman-style pizza. Whether it’s called Pizza al Taglia, pinsa or Pizza Romana, the idea is essentially the same: a medium-thin, airy flatbread with a nice crunch and fresh ingredients on top. Brands like Bonci in Chicago, Pizza Baby in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Triple Beam Pizza in Los Angeles have had success selling Roman-style pizza and scaling it to multiple locations. PMQ even wrote about a recent independent upstart in South Carolina that’s bringing Roman-style to a small Southern market.
This trend showed up on the showroom floor in Chicago. Multiple booths were serving Romana squares to attendees, including La Pizzeria, a company rooted in Italian tradition. Founded 16 years ago in Ireland, La Pizzeria draws on the family recipes of its founder, Enrico Vallesi. Vallesi’s opened Mega Pizza in Rome several decades ago, and this is where the younger Vallesi honed his pizza-making standards and techniques. Today, La Pizzeria operates a large production facility in Italy, crafting 3,500 pizzas per hour by hand.
“In the U.S., we offer the bases and the tomato sauce,” Vallesi told PMQ Pizza, “but the same approach, the same handmade double-proofing sourdough, hand-stretched pizza bases.”
According to Vallesi, La Pizzeria seeks to offer U.S. operators a high-quality alternative to dense, machine-produced pizza crusts. By focusing on double-proofed, stone-baked sourdough with around 80% hydration, La Pizzeria delivers a lighter, crunchier and more digestible product, he said.
While La Pizzeria’s products might not be a fit for the average mom-and-pop pizzeria, the brand has seen success with restaurants, hotels and catering operations. “We’re glad to see that the market is really looking for things like this,” Vallesi said. Vallesi also added that La Pizzeria could be a good fit for a pizzeria that serves a different style of pie and wants to add Roman-style on a lunch menu, for example.
Charlie Pogacar is PMQ Pizza’s senior editor.
