Story by Rick Hynum | Photos by Bianca Calascibetta
Heart-shaped pizzas aren’t exactly new to the pizza business, but Giuliana Calascibetta brings a lot more heart to making them—and every other item on her menu—than most. In fact, it’s hard to imagine anyone who loves their work more than Pizza Princess G, as she’s known to her 200,000 Twitch followers.
You might find other dough-slinging divas on social media, but there’s only one G: Warm, exuberant and outgoing, always ready to make a new friend, she’s the district manager and the ever-smiling public “face” of her family’s Rochester, New York brand, Cam’s Pizzeria. She’s also a superstar on Twitch, an ambassador for the platform and a fan favorite at Twitchcon, held annually in San Diego.
And now she’s a prominent crusader for heart health, thanks to her recent livestream event on Twitch that raised a whopping $15,000 for the American Heart Association—in 24 hours, mind you.
“I know it sounds silly—pizza and heart health—because pizza isn’t the healthiest food,” Calascibetta told PMQ Pizzaa few days after the event. “But I believe in balance. If you’re going to have a Friday cheat meal, let it be pizza. But get quality pizza with quality ingredients. Not gas-station pizza.”
The AHA certainly had no objections to a fundraiser hosted by a pizza brand, especially after the final tally came in. “According to their benchmarks, that $15,000 is more than 90% higher than the average American company’s total annual contribution,” Calascibetta said. “It was equivalent to six school-led campaigns across an entire year, which is crazy.”
Well, maybe not that crazy. Not since the heyday of TV specials like the Jerry Lewis MDA Labor Day Telethon in the 1970s has there been an event quite like Calascibetta’s “Pizza From the Heart.”
Yes, the livestream featured heart-shaped pizzas, naturally. But it wasn’t a round-the-clock commercial for Cam’s Pizzeria—nothing of the sort, in fact. Calascibetta is one of the pizza community’s most innovative marketers, arguably in a league of her own. (Name one other pizzeria manager doing what she does pretty much every single day on a red-hot social platform like Twitch. We’ll wait.) But instead of pushing her menu and touting specials, she created a wildly eclectic program focused entirely on heart-healthy living and even saving lives—one segment featured the AHA’s Megan Vargulick teaching CPR with a training dummy.
Jerry Lewis spotlighted famous singers, dancers and actors in his telethons for the Muscular Dystrophy Association. Calascibetta showcased rising Twitch stars like freestyle rapper Thug Shells and music reviewer Chomp. At times it was a live road show, with Calascibetta journeying to other Cam’s stores to discuss heart health with franchise owners—who, by the way, donated 20% of the day’s sales to the AHA—and delivering pies to her former elementary school and to healthcare providers at the University of Rochester Urgent Care clinic.
“We made heart-shaped pizzas and heart-shaped Valentines, and people were donating like crazy—$500, $250. It was so cool,” Calascibetta recalls. “I wore my Apple Watch, with a widget that mirrored my heart rate on-stream so viewers could see when I was stressed and my heart rate went up. We talked about heart rate, beats per minute. I think my peak was like 160, which is wild…Customers were coming into the Browncroft location and we were out front saying, ‘Happy Pizza Friday!’ and taking Polaroids.”
Calascibetta, who’s an artist as well as a marketing wizard, also painted a large original piece of pizza artwork (above) that auctioned for nearly $1,400 at the end of the stream. “We even put real pizza seasoning on it so you could smell it,” she notes.
In short, it was a lot. A lot of work for Calascibetta, and a lot of fun, with a lot of genuine love poured into every single moment and a lot of money raised. “I’m not gonna lie,” she said. “I’ve done seven 24-hour streams. This was the first one where I had to take a nap. That was around 5 to 6 a.m. after I finished all my crafts. Heart health is tied to mental health, and I needed it….And, honestly, it took me a week to feel normal again.”
Calascibetta’s relationship with the AHA didn’t begin with a pitch or a sponsorship proposal. Rather, it started quietly in her Twitch stream last year, where the AHA kept popping into her chat, initially reacting to the heart-shaped pizzas she was making live but undoubtedly hooked by her bright, fun-loving energy. “They came in consistently, like every week or so,” she says.
The connection deepened at last year’s Twitchcon, where Calascibetta hosted her first-ever meet-and-greet. “It was for one hour, and I thought, ‘Maybe two people will be there.’ But enough people showed up that we went over our time.” One of those fans was an AHA representative named Brittany—the same person from the Pizza Princess G chat—and she and Calascibetta became fast friends.
But when Brittany pitched the idea of a charity stream, Calascibetta was initially skeptical. Would the money really go where it would do the most good? “She told me AHA is, like, the third most trusted charitable cause in the U.S., I think, behind St. Jude and Make-A-Wish. That’s the most important thing to me. If I’m going to ask my community—people who have trusted me for years—to donate their money, I wanted to make sure there was no B.S.”
Calascibetta smiled. “In a nice G-rated way, of course.”
As discussions continued, Calascibetta said she felt seen as a person, not just as a well-known content creator being recruited for a cause. When she later attended the AHA’s Red Dress Collection Concert in New York City—she was one of just 10 creators invited—she was sold. “It was so cool,” she recalls. “But the coolest thing was, I didn’t feel like a number. They sincerely got to know me. It wasn’t just, ‘Let’s get her involved, she’ll make us some money.’ It was a relationship.”
Now Calascibetta is all in, an enthusiastic advocate for heart health. The AHA has even asked her to visit a Buffalo Bills training camp this summer and teach CPR to the players. “So doors are opening—and it’s not for clout. It’s about reaching a bigger audience because I believe, like Spider-Man, that with great power comes great responsibility. If we can get the Bills talking about heart health….”
She breaks off thoughtfully for a moment. “Streamers get so many eyes and ears,” she continues. “What are we using it for? Yeah, it’s fun to entertain, do skits, get laughs—I’m the first one to say that. But I really believe we need more of this kind of thing, especially in America.”
That’s why advocating for the AHA is now key to Calascibetta’s mission. “It will be one of the most important things I do in my life until the day I die,” she said. “Is it the only thing I’ll focus on? No, but the ‘queen of hearts’ thing feels like a part of my identity now. I’m gonna do it again next year for sure. Who says I won’t double the amount I raised?”
Meanwhile, her livestream on Twitch will likely keep growing as more people fall under her spell. Calascibetta doesn’t think of herself as a content creator but as a “life-sharer.” And spreading joy through pizza is one of the things she loves most. Unlike many Twitch streamers, she says, “I don’t always stream at home because I like to be in the pizzeria. I feel part of something [bigger]. We have regular customers, and I think they feel that, too. Because if you go to a chain pizzeria, they’re not going to remember your kid’s name or your order.”
“People think that’s simple, but it’s not,” she adds. “That’s community. And that’s what people are yearning for. What’s cool about what we’re doing at Cam’s Pizzeria is that we train employees not to just be good at their job but to realize they’re part of something bigger. And when they leave here, well, go forth and bring that [feeling] to whatever comes next.”
“Pizza is universal,” she adds. “It’s basically the same word in every language. Everybody knows it. That’s so cool. I call it the ‘circle of ‘za.’ It’s all connected.”
Rick Hynum is PMQ’s editor in chief.
