Story by Rick Hynum | Photos by Alex D’Antonio
Late summer can be a frustratingly slow period for restaurant traffic, but that’s not a problem for Toss & Fire Pizza, with three restaurants and three food trucks in Central New York (CNY). If anything, it’s owner Nick Sanford’s busiest time of the year. From late August through Labor Day, he parks one of his trucks in a prime vendor spot at the Great New York State Fair, which draws more than 1 million people, and the crowds flock to him.
We’re talking more than 20,000 pizzas sold in just 13 days in both 2025 and 2026.
Granted, a little bit of that success is due to dumb luck. Dinosaur Bar-B-Que occupied the coveted location—near the main stage, where featured musical acts perform—for decades but gave it up after the pandemic. “We were awarded the space [in 2023], and it’s turned into its own thing,” Sanford says. “I applied for it, but I told everybody, ‘There’s no chance they’re going to pick us.’ But they said we have a good brand that’s well-known in the community, and we do a lot of marketing [to advertise our presence] at the fair.”
Many operators would be content to bask in such good fortune and leave well enough alone. But Sanford took his lucky break and shrewdly amplified it with a strategy that makes Toss & Fire’s presence at the fair a main event in its own right every year.
Looking back on Toss & Fire’s steady growth since he started the company with a single food trailer in 2015, Sanford notes, “A lot of opportunities have come my way. And I think I said yes to some of the right things, even when I didn’t necessarily have a plan.”
Fortunately, Sanford did have a plan for the state fair. And it was fire.
A Business Built On Mobile
Sanford was a Panera Bread manager when he launched Toss & Fire as a side gig. He saw a need for a mobile pizzeria in the CNY region, bought his first trailer with a credit card and taught himself the wood-fired pizza craft. “I quickly realized that I had something going there,” he says. Within weeks, he quit Panera and made that trailer his new career. “We were doing farmers markets and breweries—pretty much anyone who would answer my call about setting up events. I didn’t say no to anything.”
He soon bought a second trailer, then opened his first brick-and-mortar location in October 2016 in North Syracuse. He purchased his first food truck in 2019 and followed that up with a second brick-and-mortar shop in Camillus in 2020. By 2021, he had switched entirely from trailers to trucks, rolling out his third mobile unit in 2022. Finally, 2023 saw the opening of a third Toss & Fire pizzeria, this one a satellite location inside Harvey’s Garden in Syracuse.
Interestingly, Sanford admits that he opened his first Toss & Fire brick-and-mortar shop to support his food trucks. “We were renting a shared space, using this tiny little mixer to make our dough—I’d have to split one bag of flour into three batches of dough—and that just wasn’t viable over the long term. Opening the brick-and-mortar made sense, because we needed a commissary kitchen for the trucks. A lot of pizza places start with brick-and-mortars and then add a food truck. We needed the brick-and-mortar to support the food trucks.”
That first standalone Toss & Fire restaurant proved so successful, Sanford later expanded it to occupy the entire building, added a dining room, plus beer and wine, and eventually built out a full commissary in a different space, also in Syracuse. That commissary now serves the food trucks and the restaurants.
But food trucks remain Sanford’s true love. “The business was built on mobile,” he says. “As much as I love our brick-and-mortars, there’s something special about the mobile business. No day is ever the same as the day before. One day, I’m working a concert with 20,000 country music fans. The next day, I’m at a wedding with 150 people, and the next day, it’s a graduation party or a corporate event. It keeps you on your toes….I think the mobile pizza business is a blast.”
Over the Top
And there’s no bigger blast than the Great New York State Fair, an event that opened on August 26 this year with The All-American Rejects and also featured Third Eye Blind, ZZ Top, Ashanti and other musical acts. In 2023, Toss & Fire’s first year in its current prime location at the fair, country star Lainey Wilson drew a record crowd of 53,200 fans.
Still, Toss & Fire is just one of hundreds of food vendors at the fair. “It’s massive,” Sanford says. “You don’t want to get lost in this sea of vendors. I quickly realized that we needed to stand out, to have something different.”
Which brings us back to that aforementioned plan. Sanford and his team don’t just fire up tasty pies for the fair. They create a showstopping experience of their own within the overall fair experience, one that makes headline news before the fair even kicks off.
It starts with the fair menu. The fair “gives us room to have a little more fun and push things further than we normally would in the restaurants,” Sanford says. “Guests come to the fair every year looking for those over-the-top items, so we definitely lean into that. We try to balance the menu with things that are just really good and approachable while also having a few items that make people stop, look at it and say, ‘That’s crazy,’ and then order it because they have to try it.”
But a great deal of thought—and months of planning—goes into those over-the-top items. “For us to pull off these 13 days, it’s like a full-year operation,” Sanford says. “I have planning meetings every month. We’re dealing with various moving parts to make it happen. There are five or six of us involved specifically for the menu.”
Sanford invites his team members to write down their wildest ideas for new signature pizzas, and everyone gets a vote. “We vote on what we think could actually work,” he explains, “and we all try to agree before we go on to test the pies. We might have a list of, like, 50 items, then we narrow that list down to eight or 10 that we’re actually going to make and see how they work.”
The group tests each pizza or appetizer at the commissary. “We all give it a score—zero to five. We add up the numbers and choose the ones with the highest score. There’s no idea that’s too wacky, especially for the fair. The whole idea is that the fair pizzas are supposed to be over the top. I like to say that at least one of them should be something your grandmother would be offended by if she saw it on the menu.”
For 2026, that potentially “offensive” pie was the Girl Dinner Pizza (pictured above), piled with a Caesar salad and garlic Parmesan fries. “It was a little ridiculous, but it tasted really great. And we always balance that kind of item with something that’s just a really good combo, so this year it was the Fair Deli Gambino.” That grandma-friendly pie featured an olive oil base, fresh garlic, mozz and meatballs, finished with whipped ricotta, hot honey, fresh basil and shaved Romano.
Then there was the Buzzer Beater Mac & Cheese Pizza, featuring fried chicken, spicy mac and cheese, roasted orange bell peppers and caramelized onions. Other new items included Zab’s Sweet Heat Chicken Wings, flavored with Zab’s St. Augustine wing sauce and Zab’s Hot Honey, and the Parmesan Bacon Garlic Chicken Wings, deep-fried and tossed in garlic butter with Romano cheese and candied bacon.
Sanford and his squad also served up the new Deep-Fried Garlic Knots (pictured below), tossed in garlic butter, topped with Pecorino Romano and served on a stick with housemade vodka sauce for dipping. That item “went viral,” Sanford says. “It just blew up overnight to the point that we sold 1,100 orders in one day. It was unbelievable. And we can serve them quicker than a pizza, because the pizza needs to be assembled, cooked, cut and boxed. So there’s a growth opportunity with that item.”
An Event Around the Event
Once the fair menu is settled, the team holds a press event prior to the fair. Sanford sends out a press release to local, regional and national media and invites journalists and influencers to a tasting event at one of his brick-and-mortar pizzerias. “Everybody knows the fair is happening, obviously, but to get people excited about what we’re doing specifically at the fair, we create an event around the event,” Sanford says.
The result: Area TV stations and newspapers promote the fair menu for Toss & Fire every year shortly before the fair opens. “They’ll interview me, show the pies, talk about the menu,” Sanford says. “It’s a bunch of free publicity that gets people excited about both the fair and specifically about Toss & Fire at the fair.”
Of course, the pizzas have to be both delicious and intriguing, and Toss & Fire’s team never disappoints. The 2024 fair menu, for example, featured a pizza inspired by The Bear that came loaded with thinly sliced sirloin, four cheeses, mild giardiniera and semi-spicy banana peppers, plus the Bold Coast Lobster Mac Pizza and the Chicken Potsticker.
It’s a “ton of work,” Sanford says, but those 13 days translate to huge sales as well as unparalleled brand awareness for Toss & Fire. And that means more business for both the food trucks and the restaurants. Sanford takes pride in the team that helps him stay on top of his sprawling mini-empire and points to his wife, Lauren, as the linchpin of his family, which includes three children between the ages of six and 11.
In fact, Cora, the 11-year-old, “is begging me to let her work” for him, he says. What could be cooler, after all, than a dad with three pizza trucks? And what could be more rewarding than to take part in life’s special moments for thousands of people—and to feed them delicious pizza while you’re there?
“Part of the reason I love my work is because I’m a kid at heart,” Sanford says. “I like going to all these different places and meeting different people and seeing all these different things. When you’ve got a mobile food business, you can’t be anything but involved in the community, because you’re part of so many big events and fundraisers. You’re part of people’s wedding days and graduations and retirements. The list goes on and on. It’s just cool to be there for all these events and celebrations in people’s lives.”
Rick Hynum is PMQ’s editor in chief.
