Beyond The Dough

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Be ThankFULL.

Thanksgiving is here. As I’ve gotten older, it’s become my favorite holiday.

I choose to live a ThankFULL life. Why?

Problems seem small when I look at how blessed that I am.

Blessings flow into a space of gratitude.

Gratitude turns what we have into enough.

Gratitude changes the way we view our life.

Gratitude attracts.

Gratitude makes you give with zero expectations.

Things in the world will always be crazy. How you view them is your choice.

Be ThankFULL!

To learn more about Perfect Crust’s pizza liners and other products, visit perfectcrust.com or email Eric Bam at Eric@perfectcrust.com

About Eric Bam:

A Boston native now living in Tulsa, OK, Eric Bam is VP of sales and marketing for Perfect Crust, with 20 years of experience in the foodservice industry. A powerful force in the workplace, Bam uses his positive attitude and tireless energy to encourage others to work hard and succeed. He has three children and loves helping the men and women of the pizza industry grow their businesses.

stream, which wasn’t very many people. From there, I started showing my chat how I make pizza, how I make dough, ranting about customers, and pretty much everything that involved a day in my life working at Cam’s Pizzeria. I realized that the more I streamed my work days, the more I became excited about what I did while I was there. Not only did I have people to talk to now, but I could entertain a live audience!”

It certainly helps that Calascibetta has loads of personality—she grew up dancing and performing in musical theater and isn’t one bit shy. But her Twitch streams are raw and unedited; whatever she’s doing at the moment—whether it’s stretching dough or boxing a pie—that’s what you’ll see.

That makes Calascibetta the winsome face of the Cam’s Pizzeria brand in a way that a TV viewer in 1997 couldn’t fathom. “Customers order their pizzas online and can tune in to my stream and watch them be made right after placing an order,” she says. “It really is an excellent way to connect with customers. I’ve even had people venture to Rochester from all over the country just to meet me and try out our pizza!”

Move Over, QS-1000

It’s safe to say our time traveler from the 1990s never saw any of this coming. She likely also didn’t foresee the rise of Yelp. In 1999, pizzeria operators still counted on their guests to provide feedback the old-school way—with a kind (or grumpy) word to the server or manager, maybe filling out a card at the table. In PMQ’s winter edition that year, we spotlighted feedback technology that surely must have felt cutting-edge at the time: the QS-1000, an electronic device for conducting post-meal surveys. Diners tapped out their responses to preprogrammed questions, and the answers could be “reloaded into your computer” to generate “simple yet often enlightening” reports.

That sort of tech might sound like sweet relief to modern-day pizza pros who have suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous Yelp reviews. Yelp has been weaponized in recent years and can do more damage to a restaurant’s reputation in a single day than a horde of rats in your dining room. Then again, smart operators who carefully manage their Yelp page can minimize the negatives of crowdsourced reviews while also showcasing the positive feedback that makes their pizzeria special.

And who among us could have imagined, 25 years ago, that pizza delivery could become so complicated? In PMQ’s Summer 2000 issue, two pizzeria owners spoke candidly about their decision to add a fee to every delivery order. After much anguish, they finally did it, but they didn’t want to. So what would our time traveler from 1997 think about corporate giants like DoorDash and Uber Eats? These companies charge both the restaurant and the customer for delivering their food. Moreover, many customers order your pizza through them when they could just as easily order it directly from you!

But, for some pizzerias, especially those that previously couldn’t deliver at all, third-party platforms have been godsends as labor costs keep soaring. Our time traveler would surely shake her head in wonderment.

Embrace the Change

OK, so the pizza marketing world has changed a lot since PMQ first hit mailboxes in 1997. Change is inevitable, after all, and it’s usually a double-edged sword. Still, as Calascibetta’s story illustrates, some things haven’t changed. Like the need for human connection, for food that nourishes the body and the soul, for meeting and learning from people who feel passionate about what they do and want to share it with you.

And that’s what the pizza industry is still about. The work you’re doing in your pizza shop, day in and day out, matters, however tedious it might sometimes feel. But now you’ve got better tools to show off the fruits of that labor, more—and much cheaper—ways to engage your customers, and, above all, more opportunities to build a community centered around your restaurant.

True, it’s not the kind of community that our time traveler would recognize. But it’s a community in which young people like Calascibetta and others in her generation—the customers who will keep your business alive for decades to come—feel right at home. No doubt the world will keep right on changing, and you’ll have to keep right on learning. So accept it. Embrace it. Keep adding to it and making it better. After all, it’s the only world we’ve got.