The Cincinnati Business Courier named LaRosa’s Pizzeria one of the 100 largest private firms in the Greater Cincinnati area, noting that the chain’s sales have climbed to nearly $192 million.
Michael LaRosa, son of the brand’s founder, Buddy LaRosa, took over as president in 2008 and became CEO in 2019. Michael is reportedly grooming his son, Nick, to run the company in the future.
When Buddy first started LaRosa’s in 1954, his family members thought he was making a big mistake. Even his own father. “[He said,] ‘Are you crazy? People eat potatoes in this town. They’re not going to eat pizza,’” LaRosa once said.
In fact, LaRosa’s has grown to 60-plus franchise and corporate locations in Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana. In 1991, it became one of the first pizza chains to implement a system that let customers call and place an order using a single phone number for all of the brand’s locations.
“A watershed milestone for LaRosa’s was when we united the ordering and customer service function under one phone number,” Michael once told PMQ. “Within the first few years after the launch, our business grew threefold.”
In a recent interview with the Cincinnati Business Courier, Michael noted, “Nobody ever cared as much as Buddy did. [But] in subsequent generations, that care has to be there…we all try and behave like mini-Buddys.”
