By Charlie Pogacar
This week, I hosted a webinar: Increasing Summer Sales with High-Traffic Promotions. Our esteemed guests were Hengam Stanfield of Mattenga’s Pizzeria and Hisham Abdelfattah of Willow Street Pizza. Both guests shared some wonderful insights into how they drive sales during the summer months.
One of the things that really stuck out to me and PMQ’s editor-in-chief, Rick Hynum, was that both operators mentioned strategies that involved getting children into their pizzerias. Stanfield detailed a promotion where Mattenga’s teams up with local summertime daycares and invites the kids to come in and design their own pizzas.
“Busses and busses of daycares come right at 10 a.m. and each kid gets to design their own pizza,” Stanfield said. The event has become so popular, she said, “that even last month, (in April), we’d already started receiving calls again for daycares wanting to book those.”
Related: How to Avoid a Summer Sales Slump at Your Pizzeria
Each child also leaves with a Mattenga’s voucher to incentivize their family to come back and experience Mattenga’s for lunch or dinner. “That drives a lot of sales,” Stanfield reports.
Abdelfattah detailed one of Willow Street Pizza’s longest-running promotions: Kids Eat Free Tuesdays, where, with the purchase of a one adult entree, a kid under the age of 11 can have anything off the kid’s menu they choose. That’s something the pizzeria has offered for over 30 years, and it’s been a great way to connect with the local community and to drive summertime sales.
Related: Rising Culinary Star is Now Executive Chef at Willow Street Pizza
These are two different promotions that accomplish the same thing: they put the respective pizzerias on the map for families. During summer, being top of mind is especially important, as kids are no longer in school and families are constantly looking for excuses to get out of the house (as a parent of two young children, I can promise this is accurate).
The respective promotions also got Rick and I talking about some other kid-friendly ideas pizzerias have come up with over the years. Rick, a walking encyclopedia when it comes to pizzeria marketing, started reeling off examples.
-Rosa’s Pizzeria in Prescott, Arizona, held a box-design contest where kids could earn big money for their school.
-Dempsey’s Restaurant & Brewpub in South Dakota started a “Read by the Slice” program loosely inspired by Pizza Hut’s famed Book It! Initiative.
-PMQ has done several other stories on how to appeal to kids, including one regarding creating a better family-friendly atmosphere and another about six ways to create a kid-friendly beverage menu at your pizzeria.
We encourage you to check out those articles, and to also watch the aforementioned webinar, which can be viewed on demand. Summer is right around the corner—if it’s not already here—and there’s no time like the present to begin planning for it.
