By Tracy Morin
Whether you’re running a single mom-and-pop shop or a multi-location empire, setting standards is a must—especially when it comes to employee training. Consistent training procedures create an enjoyable guest experience, reduce costly employee turnover and food waste, and help today’s new hires become tomorrow’s leaders. Here, experts from four top chains discuss how their training ensures maximum success for both the business and its staff.
PMQ: What is your training process like, and what tools do you use to help new hires?
Austin Alvarez: We sign them up for Opus, which is a learning management system (LMS) that focuses on micro learning, and they start taking courses on their phone. The first course is a welcome and introduction: what we do, the history, the culture and, of course, the pizzas.
Pizza cooks start by touching our dough and getting to know our raw ingredients—going in the walk-in, identifying different prep items, and filling our decorating station with those prep items. Understanding the oven is super important, too. On their first day, they’ll decorate and sauce some pies.
Our front of house spends their first day on a table with a manager—watching pizzas come out of the oven, learning all of our toppings and specialty pizzas, how to cut a pizza, and our standards of what a Frank Pepe pizza should look like. Our servers, counter employees and bartenders each have their own steps to service. These would include greeting the guests; asking if they’ve been to Frank Pepe before; offering salads, drinks, specialty pies and seasonal pizzas; checking in after two minutes or two bites of a salad or pizza; getting refills; and offering dessert. Knowing those steps of service would be the first thing that front-of-house people do.
Ashley Balluf: Every new team member undergoes a comprehensive 30-day training journey. This program blends our interactive online learning platform with in-person experiences, including knowledge demonstrations, hands-on practice and skill assessments. We use a tech-based training platform, Stella, which provides structured and engaging digital coursework. This is complemented by traditional tools like handbooks, operational manuals, and hands-on, shoulder-to-shoulder training to reinforce learning in real time.Culture is woven into the fabric of training from day one. For company-operated locations, all new hires attend onboarding and orientation at our Support Center, where we introduce them to the Happy Joe’s brand and our safety standards. Once on-site, the focus shifts to customer service excellence and deepening their knowledge of our menu offerings.
Heather Figg: We place a strong emphasis on both culture and technical training from day one. Our digital training platform, the Detroit Pizza Academy (hosted through Wisetail), plays a big role in this. It allows us to deliver engaging video content, interactive modules and up-to-date resources for all roles—whether it’s front of house, back of house or leadership development. We also use it to roll out new menu items, seasonal LTOs and company-wide initiatives. We combine this technology with hands-on training led by certified trainers in each restaurant, including role play, demos and cross-training opportunities.
Rachael Moseley: We combine a dynamic online learning platform with a hands-on checklist to guide new team members through their first week. For hourly employees, our training materials are designed for real-time application. The training checklists include QR codes linking to short videos featuring some of our best team members, demonstrating everything from greeting a table to upselling different menu items to learning the basics of liquor, beer and wine.
We are in a digital age, so training reflects that—such as providing the employee handbook in a QR code to be accessible to all, utilizing Toast as our POS system with user-friendly training modules, and making ServSafe training available by logging into our company website. This ensures our team is not only compliant but truly understands the why behind our best practices.
PMQ: What strategies do you use for follow-up to ensure the long-term success of new employees?
Alvarez: We have a steps of service check-in for servers, which the manager would perform. It asks simple questions: Does the server know all the steps of service? Are they performing them at the table? The manager listens or watches the server as they serve tables, and they determine whether they feel the server is performing them correctly.
We also have a management developmental record (MDR) and a teammate developmental record (TDR). The MDR is for a manager in training, but all of our managers have MDRs, whether they’ve been with us for a decade or three months. Our TDR, the teammate developmental record, is something new this year, and it essentially does the same thing as the MDR. It goes through basic competencies, like: Do you know how to operate the dishwasher? Do you know how to answer phones and take an order? Do you show respect to your teammates? Do you show up on time? That’s been super helpful for us, because we can keep track of how somebody is progressing in these areas and ways in which we can continue to help them.
Balluf: Training doesn’t stop after 30 days—it evolves. We verify comprehension by requiring new hires to demonstrate and articulate the skills and knowledge they’ve acquired. Beyond that, we host monthly workshops for our leadership team—our “Coaches”—to maintain our standards. These two- to three-hour sessions, led by our Support Center team and special guest speakers, cover new initiatives, continuous learning and real-time retraining.
Figg: Follow-up and accountability are key, so we conduct regular check-ins, skill validations and assessments to make sure every new hire is supported beyond their first few shifts.
Moseley: The team is rallied for a structured 15-minute “pre-meal” before every shift to go over menu knowledge, news and notes, beer training and some type of motivational end. These are structured but energizing, like a locker-room talk, setting up each individual for a successful shift.
For our managers, development is a continuous, layered process. Throughout a six-week training program, we integrate self-evaluations that promote reflection on challenges and personal growth. These conversations are seamlessly woven into the experience, creating an ongoing dialogue about development rather than a formal test. At the end of the process, leaders have a final check-in to ensure they’re fully prepared to step into their role with confidence and the right support.
PMQ: What role do seasoned employees play in mentoring new hires?
Alvarez: We encourage our managers to work alongside new pizza cooks. A lot of our managers are people who came up through the ranks, so they might have been very good pizza cooks themselves. We’re always trying to give constructive feedback throughout the shift, to continue to coach and support new teammates.
Balluf: We’ve built a dedicated mentorship structure around our Certified Trainers, whom we call Mentors. These experienced team members are handpicked for their natural leadership abilities and undergo an extended training process. They guide every new hire and serve as culture carriers, skill coaches and role models throughout the training period.
Moseley: We feature different trainers from various restaurants in our training videos, which we update every quarter. We encourage teams to send in their best clips to showcase what makes their location special—it creates a sense of pride and ownership, especially for our long-time employees. We also offer cross-training opportunities that give team members who are interested in becoming a manager a chance to test the waters, learn what leadership looks like, and decide if they’re ready to take that next step. They’re seasoned employees who genuinely love the brand and want to spread that passion to every new team member they meet. It helps keep our culture strong and growing.
PMQ: Are there any training pitfalls to avoid?
Alvarez: Don’t get complacent—continuing to get better every day is important. We try to improve our procedures, asking, “How do we make this specific task easier for our teammates?” Listen to the advice of your new trainees. I love to sit down with somebody a few weeks into their training and ask, “How are things going so far? Where do you feel our training program has been very helpful, or where has it not been so helpful?”
Moseley: One of the biggest challenges I’ve seen is over-relying on technology to take the lead in training. While tech is a powerful tool, it can’t replace human connection. A computer won’t make someone feel seen or supported.
We also recognize the importance of keeping our training content fresh and relevant. To stay in tune with the needs of today’s learners, we continuously evolve our approach. With many team members accustomed to short-form content from social media, we’ve adapted our training videos to fit that format. By incorporating 30-second clips, interactive components and engaging formats, we ensure our content is captivating and gives our team members an edge.
Tracy Morin is PMQ’s associate editor.
