By Charlie Pogacar
After 18 years of running a successful pizza shop, Rocco Pifferetti was ready for a new challenge. So he opened a new slice shop, Rocco’s Slice House…inside a grocery store.
Customers can now find Pifferetti slinging slices six days a week at a Shop ‘n Save in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, on the outskirts of the Pittsburgh metro area. For about $1,200 a month, Pifferetti is leasing a 500-square-foot space that used to house a pharmacy. It’s enough space for a pair of coolers, a deck oven and a modest prep area. It’s a new kind of business model for Pifferetti, but it’s one that’s allowed him to expand his pizza business in a cost-efficient manner.
“Over the years, I’ve been looking for ways to branch out,” Pifferetti said. “I thought about a food truck and things like that. One day I was eating lunch and saw something for lease inside of a Stop ‘n Shop, and I was immediately intrigued.”
Pifferetti’s mind went to the foot traffic inside of a grocery store. “It’s a boardwalk, basically,” Pifferetti said.
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Despite the relatively small footprint, Pifferetti has used the new venture as an opportunity to up his pizza game. In his own words, Rocco’s Slice House pizza—which he sells by the slice and whole pie—is nothing like the product one would find at Rocco’s Pizzeria in Youngwood, about 15 miles south of the Shop ‘n Save. Part of the way he wanted to challenge himself was by relearning the way he had traditionally made pizza.
“I could easily have just shoved my pizza out there the same way I do it [at Rocco’s Pizzeria],” Pifferetti said. “I could cook it in the same conveyor oven I use now and make the same product, and people would come because they like the pizza. But I was, like, I have to do something different. I was eager to try to start all over again.”
Pifferetti spent a lot of time playing with different ingredients and hydration levels to raise the quality of his craft. For example, he wanted to move away from the traditional provolone-mozzarella cheese blend found at a lot of pizzerias in the Pittsburgh area. Now he uses a mozzarella that is shredded in house at the new shop. The whole process was not easy—even stretching dough felt foreign due to the higher hydration he was using for the 650° deck-oven temperatures.
“I came home one night so frustrated,” Pifferetti said of the time spent coming up with new recipes. “I had to erase my brain of anything that I knew from the last 18 years of making pizza and sit down with the internet and books and just study. It really was like relearning from scratch.”
The work he’s put in has been worth it. Locals rave about the pizza and the fact that they can get it in the middle of a grocery store. Pifferetti said he has been told that his pizza has brought customers into the Shop ‘n Save who otherwise would be shopping elsewhere. He gets the occasional complaint from a customer who expects a $1.50 slice like they are at a Sam’s Club, but most patrons seem to understand that the quality of his pizza—and the fact that they are 20″ pies—warrants the $3.50 price tag for a cheese or pepperoni slice and $5 for a white one.
The operation is relatively easy to run. Pifferetti employs one team-member part time who mainly focuses on taking orders, and he’s currently training his one full-time employee—his friend, Josh DeFelice—with potential future expansion in mind. DeFelice is serving as Pifferetti’s apprentice of sorts.
“That’s definitely the long-term goal right now,” Pifferetti said. “To get this place going, train my friend, Josh, on the ins and outs of pizza and then try to find another place where he might be able to open up a similar type of shop.”
Maybe it will be difficult to replicate the success he’s had at the Shop ‘n Save. But Pifferetti is always up for a challenge.
