By Charlie Pogacar
Salvatore Reina, owner and operator of Francesca Pizza and Pasta in Northern New Jersey, has run a successful pizzeria for 16 years. During this time, Reina is particularly proud of building a strong team and forging meaningful relationships with the local communities surrounding his two stores.
These strong community ties and a dedicated team have enabled Reina to expand into new revenue streams, including a highly lucrative school lunch program. He recently announced the launch of Francesca Lunch Box, which will provide lunches to six area schools in the upcoming school year. This initiative is projected to generate over $250,000 in annual revenue for the pizzeria.
Reina champions the program as a win for everyone involved: Children receive wholesome meals they enjoy, schools gain a reliable local partner for lunch deliveries, and Francesca’s Pizza and Pasta benefits from increased revenue while strengthening its relationship with the community.
Related: How This N.J. Pizzeria Increased Its Revenue By 15 Percent
“I’ve always been a give-back-to-the-community type of person,” Reina said. “But when it comes to the business side of things, we have to make money. This initiative kind of covers both things at once: We’re finding a new way to be generous with our time, but we’re also making money.”
In order to make it all happen, the pizzeria partnered with SchoolBitez, an online ordering platform that specializes in school lunch catering programs. Reina noted that SchoolBitez does not charge restaurants any up-front money to set up on its platform. Rather, the software company makes its money via an 8-cent-per order fee that Reina built into his own profit model.
Parents log into the Francesca Pizza and Pasta portal on the SchoolBitez platform and order from the eight to 12 options—a menu Reina specially developed for youngsters. Kids can choose things like pizza, grilled cheese sandwiches, pasta dishes and chicken fingers. Each dish comes with a side of fresh fruit or vegetables. There are also options for kids with just about any dietary restriction out there—something Reina knew would be a huge selling point to schools and parents alike.
“We use real cheese, we are a nut-free facility and the whole menu we use is non-GMO, no high fructose corn syrup,” Reina said. “With all due respect to a lot of the bigger foodservice providers out there, there’s a reason a lot of kids complain about school lunches. We feel like we’re doing something really delicious and nutritious for these kids.”
Each order is aggregated by the SchoolBitez platform and can be viewed on the back end by the Francesca chef who prepares it en masse each school-day morning. The pizzeria’s delivery driver comes in to help organize each delivery and print off labels—again, sorted by SchoolBitez—and bag them up. That means Reina is paying one person to do the majority of the work—and a second to come in for about 45 minutes before they go out on delivery. The orders show up to the school already sorted by classroom, so teachers and administrators have little trouble doling them out.
Reina didn’t just wake up one day with contracts to provide school lunches for six area schools. Rather, this part of his business grew incrementally until it was something he decided he wanted to focus on. It started with Reina partnering with a school or two doing a Pizza Day every Friday, for example, which turned into doing a Pasta Day every other Monday or Tuesday.
But how did he even get those contacts and contracts in the first place? That was a grassroots effort, he said. “Honestly, I just approached it old school,” Reina said. “I’ve sent out a four-page mailer to every daycare, preschool and school that says “Attention: School Lunch Coordinator.” I send out emails, too, to about 120 schools that are within a few miles’ radius.”
What Reina has learned is that every school has a different decision-maker. Most schools, he has found, are in a one- or two-year contract with a large national foodservice company. A lot of those contracts, Reina said, are often for, say, 85% of school days. For schools in a position like that, they may be looking for ways to cover the remaining 15% of school days. This is an excellent opportunity for a local business to get its foot in the door at a local school. What school wouldn’t spring for a weekly, locally-catered Pizza Day, for example?
“I’ve always been a huge proponent of getting our food into people’s mouths any way that we can,” Reina said. “If you’re making good, quality food that you’re proud of, you’re hoping people will enjoy it and come back. Of course, a great part of this is the parents are going to talk to their kids and suddenly the kids are like, ‘I love this food from Francesca’s.’ So maybe now the parents are wanting to try your pizzeria for lunch.”
“But the direct effect,” Reina adds, “is even better.” He runs through the math effortlessly: “This school year we’re going to be doing 260 meals daily. Let’s say it’s just 200 meals to make the math simpler. If I’m getting $7 per meal, that’s $1,400 every morning in the register. If I’m earning 25% profit, that’s $350 a day profit to start the day that doesn’t even interrupt lunch service, let alone dinner service.”
Of course, as was already noted, it does mean Reina has to staff his restaurant for several hours in the morning he wouldn’t have otherwise. He actually turned this into a win, too: He offered his longtime chef a deal to come in five hours earlier and leave five hours earlier, too. “Now he gets off at 5 p.m. and gets to go home and have food with his family,” Reina said. “So everybody is winning.”
Everybody is winning including the schools themselves. One last nugget Reina offered is something he likes to do with each decision-maker he meets with. He offers to build in a certain amount of the price structure to give back to a certain school program, whether it’s the PTA or the school’s youth sports programs. At the end of each school year, he cuts a check to give back to said good cause, further keeping his pizzeria’s name in the good graces of the community.
It’s things like this that make the school lunch program something worth exploring for every pizzeria out there, Reina said.
“The school lunch program is something that maybe sounds complex—it might sound crazy—but it’s really not,” Reina said. “It’s like a catering order every single morning that you can predict. You can bank on it. $1,400 for 180 days—that’s fantastic revenue. Who wouldn’t want that?”
