By Charlie Pogacar
In November 2022, the inaugural Pizza Tomorrow Summit kicked off in Orlando as Hurricane Nicole barreled toward Florida. It felt like a worse-case scenario for show owner Glenn Celentano, who had poured his heart and soul into getting the event off the ground. But then somebody pointed something out to Celentano: The hurricane, he said, was “the best thing that could have happened” to the event in its first year.
“And I said, ‘Well, what do you mean?’” Celentano remembered on the floor of this year’s Pizza Tomorrow Summit, which is co-located with the Florida Restaurant Show at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando. “He said, ‘Well, anybody can put a smile on their face and be happy when things are going well. But when the wind is blowing 85 m.p.h., and it’s raining sideways and the airports and roads are shut down, and you still have that happy smile on your face? That means you’ve really got something here.’”
Celentano notes that all of the exhibitors from 2022 came back in 2023, when the weather was quite a bit better. Building off that momentum, the 2024 edition of the Pizza Tomorrow Summit and Florida Restaurant Show, which took place Wednesday and Thursday, November 6 and 7, was even more successful. The show doubled in terms of the number of exhibitors, growing from nine aisles to 18 aisles in just one year.
“And the attendees have come out in droves,” Celentano noted amongst a bustling crowd as the PA system blared upbeat music. “When we founded this show, we picked Orlando because, as you know, pizza is a family industry. There’s no better family destination in the world than Orlando, Florida.
“These people work 27 hours a day,” Celentano joked. “They don’t get a lot of vacation time. So why not make this not just a business trip, but a family trip? Bring your family with you. They can go to Seaworld or Disney. Stay a couple extra days, enjoy yourself.”
Taking time off could be easier for pizzeria operators who adopt some of the technologies featured at this year’s Pizza Tomorrow Summit. Here’s a look at three pieces of equipment that “never call in sick.”
The Pizza Drop
If attendees were having a blast at the Pizza Tomorrow Summit, so, too, were many of the exhibitors. One new exhibitor at this year’s show was Pizza Drop, a pizza vending machine franchise out of Dallas, Texas. The company was founded with the idea that it could offer an affordable entrance into the pizza space.
“We really tried to make it affordable, because the American dream shouldn’t cost you everything,” said Lauri White, vice president of sales and marketing at Pizza Drop. “We made it affordable. All it would take is a small business loan and somebody can start their journey into entrepreneurship. We wanted to create an avenue for that.”
Pizza Drop has three different machine options for franchisees. Each one holds up to 76 pizzas at a time. A consumer can choose a Cheese, Pepperoni, Hawaiian, Veggie, or Gluten-Free pizza from the machine and have a fully cooked, New York-style pizza within five minutes.
White said the machines are perfect for non-traditional franchising spaces like hospitals, airports, college campuses, theme parks and more. She also said the team sees possibilities for the machines to be placed in rural areas that are food deserts at certain hours of the night. Think of a Dollar General in a small town: Maybe somebody returning from second shift needs a bite to eat. The Pizza Drop machine gives them an opportunity to get a fresh, hot pie when other restaurants are closed.
From a franchising perspective, one thing that separates Pizza Drop, White said, is the flexibility to move the machine wherever you want. In other words, if a first location isn’t quite meeting sales goals, the machine can simply be moved to the other side of town—or another town altogether—to see if sales go up.
Stretching the Dough Dollar
The showroom floor offered other glimpses of the future. Last year, PMQ wrote about the OperaPrima dough stretcher by the Fiero Group, an automated dough stretcher that can stretch up to 200 dough balls an hour with impressive consistency.
Peter de Jong, the founder and CEO of Fiero Group, told PMQ that the Sbarro chain tested the OperaPrima machine at 15 locations for two years. The brand, which has more than 700 stores, hoped the machines would help offset labor. According to de Jong, what Sbarro found was the machines were equally if not more impactful in terms of consistency.
“If you hand-stretch large pies, they often get thin in one spot,” de Jong said. “Especially if your employees are newer, that’s going to lead to a lot of waste. [Sbarro] was able to reduce their waste by 9%.”
De Jong also emphasized that one of the best aspects of the OperaPrima is that it is, well, a machine. “The machine never calls in sick,” de Jong said. “Especially on Friday nights. And it doesn’t want a raise right after you purchase it.”
Sbarro, de Jong reported, is beginning to roll the OperaPrima out at each of its 700-plus stores.
Winning the Turnover Battle
You won’t find a human being more passionate about cheese shredding than Scott Fahey, who runs Palazzolo’s Cheese Hog, a company founded by his father, Pete, in 1985. Fahey was once again on hand at the Pizza Tomorrow Summit, where he shared some insights he had gained by interacting with pizzeria operators.
“Before I was doing this, I spent 20 years in retail, managing and hiring people,” Fahey said. “I always ask questions about that. Sometimes I’m even able to give tips and tricks that I learned, like, ‘Hey, have you tried this?’ And sometimes you end up finding out, just through questioning them, that they’re an absentee owner and the manager they hired isn’t getting the job done. People buy things from people they like. Well, the same goes for management: People work hard for people they like.”
No matter the cause, employee turnover still haunts the industry as far as Fahey can tell. “I think the consistency of product because of the turnover is a really underrated thing that’s happening in the industry,” he said. “They say, ‘I’m always training somebody to make dough. I’m always training somebody to do [something else]. And it’s different every time.’ So you have to stabilize that.”
Restaurateurs often come to Fahey to find ways to ensure more consistency and efficiency in the kitchen. If an operation is using a dough mixer to shred cheese, for example, Fahey believes that operator might be driving employees away by creating unnecessarily challenging work.
“It’s just a tremendous time saver,” Fahey said of the Palazzolo Cheese Hog. “You’re making that investment but usually you’re making it back very quickly.”
