WORLD PIZZA MARKET

—Square’s Future of Restaurants 2022

Although Izzo is known to millions as a brash Italian stallion looking for love on all the wrong TV shows, he is, in real life, an earnest—and likable—pizzeria operator going through the same struggles as most PMQ readers. “Do we continue to keep our quality the same and raise our prices, pushing the costs on to our customers who have been loyal to us?” Izzo said. “Or do we lower our quality and keep our prices the same, but now our customers aren’t going to get that product they expect anymore?”

Izzo and his brother/business partner, Bobby Pokora, finally made a decision: They raised their prices so they could keep using top-shelf ingredients like Grande cheese, San Marzano DOP tomatoes and Caputo flour. “We’ve gotten some pushback from our customers,” Izzo said. “We tell them we’re just as upset as they are. We don’t want to do this just as much as they don’t want us to do it. We don’t have a choice.”

Inflation has been the story of the year for the pizzeria industry. As food costs keep soaring, menu price hikes have been a must to stay afloat. But we’ve uncovered another, more