TOP PIZZERIA STATES

BY STORES PER CAPITA Source | CHD Expert

filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in June, it had an ace up its sleeve—Pasqually’s Pizza & Wings, a new delivery-only brand that snuck in under the radar on third-party platforms nationwide in 2020. Most customers who ordered from Pasqually’s initially knew nothing about its relationship with Chuck E. Cheese—and CEC Entertainment wasn’t telling. But guess what? Virtual brand Pasqually’s shares kitchen space with brick-and-mortar brand Chuck E. Cheese, making for a cozy arrangement that has enjoyed some success thus far.

Still, switching to an efficient delivery-only model isn’t as easy as it sounds, says Deb Friar, field marketing manager for New Port Richey, Florida-based Welbilt, which provides equipment for ghost kitchens. “Many operators believe they can simply transfer equipment and processes to make the move from dine-in to delivery-only, but they often fall short in meeting the unique customer expectations for delivery,” Friar notes. Speed and consistency are essential to delivery success, she says, “but traditional restaurant kitchens have not traditionally been designed for speed.”

Marco’s Pizza, headquartered in Toledo, Ohio, hopes to solve that problem as it pilots ghost kitchens for franchisees in California, North Carolina and Houston. “These virtual or ghost kitchens are all about efficiency in a shared kitchen space, which also allows us to easily use third-party delivery drivers and provide a quick-to-open format,” says Ron Stilwell, Marco’s vice president and chief development officer.

Nili Malach Poynter, who co-founded Denver-based ChefReady with her husband, Robert, would surely agree. In July, ChefReady unveiled a facility that offers 10 high-tech, customizable ghost kitchen spaces under one roof—all for deliveryonly concepts. The company says its facility “offers a way for restaurants to maximize their delivery footprint” and “also decreases risk to restaurants during financial crises.” Their first client is a pizza shop, no less: McKinners Pizza, which already has a brickand-mortar location in Littleton, Colorado.

ChefReady’s kitchens are “plug and play,” equipped with commercial hoods, sinks, electric and gas hookups, even pest control. The company provides software that aggregates third-party delivery platforms as well as food runners to bring the orders from individual stations to delivery drivers. “For years, Robert and I watched restaurantowner friends close their brick-and-mortar restaurants due to declining profit margins and rising rent, so we were excited to hear about the ghost-kitchen concept,” Nili says. “But we realized that many operate with a ‘churn and burn’ mentality, resulting in an unprofitably high tenant turnover. We decided to create a company that offers the convenience of a ghost kitchen, but with more of a mom-and-pop, personalized level of customer service, greater efficiency and a greener footprint.”

As trends go, the ghost-kitchen concept is warming up, but it’s not red-hot yet—at least not industry-wide. “One of the big lessons of this pandemic is that restaurant brands need to rethink how much physical space they really need,” says Brittain Brown, president of Givex, a platform for gift cards, loyalty programs and POS solutions. “Pizza is uniquely suited to the delivery-only model, so cloud kitchens make a lot of sense in certain areas. But we have yet to see any chain scale significantly on cloud kitchens alone.”

Still, John Stetson, owner of four Stoner’s Pizza Joints in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and Savannah and Warner Robins, Georgia, believes it’s inevitable. “Cloud kitchens will become much more prevalent over the next 10 to 20 years due to appealing economics,” Stetson says. “Cloud kitchens offer a unique opportunity for pizza operations to open a space in a fraction of the time it takes to build [a brick-and-mortar store], minimize overhead costs and improve logistics.”

Building Better Robots

Some American restaurant-goers think foodservice robots are inevitable, too, although they’re not keen on the idea. Dina Marie Zemke, a professor at Ball State University, and fellow researchers held focus groups with 30 fast-food consumers earlier this year to gauge public opinion on robots in restaurants. In August, she published the results in a paper titled “How to Build a Better Robot for Quick Service Restaurants.” The focus-group participants expressed “a high level of resignation about the inevitability of QSRs incorporating robots” into their operations. “This finding is similar to the acceptability of routine societal change,” Zemke says. “Participants felt that [it’s] a question of when rather than a question of if.”

And the answer to the “when” question seems to be “probably sooner than later.” As we’ve reported in the past, Redmond, Washington-based Zaucer Pizza last year pilottested a robot from Picnic that can reportedly assemble 300 pizzas in an hour. Not to be outdone, White Castle announced this July that it would start piloting a new version of Miso Robotics’ burger-flipping Flippy the robot, called Flippy