Can you make your own pizza cheaper than you can buy a fully prepared one that’s frozen and ready to bake?…………… Probably,………………. Should you?
There was a time when that question was easy to answer. Back when good quality, eager employees were excited to get a job and wanted to work real hard to impress themselves as well as their fellow workers. Don’t get me wrong, there are still plenty of people that want to do a great job… If you’re like me, you have them in your company. But the reality is that it’s a tough time to find and keep these employees.
So this brings me to making your own pizza. It’s pretty easy to see that if you buy a couple cases of crusts, boxes of shredded cheese, bags of pepperoni, pizza sauce, etc. you’re in the pizza business. You’ll probably start out by making some pizzas and testing them out. You will then decide what is the perfect pizza for you. 1 crust, 5 oz sauce., 24 slices of pepperoni, 4 oz. of sausage, and 8 oz. of cheese. If you purchased everything correctly… it came in at the price your salesperson said it would…. And you made the pizza just right, you probably have about $4.50 into it. That’s great! and you better believe that your employees are stoked to get making pizzas!
So basically an employee is 20 cents a minute at $12.00/hr. that’s not counting any extra benefits or anything but for the sake of conversation, let’s leave that out. I think it’s safe to say that when a customer orders a pizza it will be 10 minutes for that employee by the time they take all the crusts, cheese, pepperoni slices, bags of sausage, diced onion (wait, we’re out, need to slice up some more).. out of the cooler and spread them all out on the table. Make the pizza (being careful to weigh every ingredient just like you planned when you costed it out) and get it in the pizza oven. …….. If it all goes well, you have another $2.00 (10 minutes x 20 cents) into the pizza. But what if everything didn’t get weighed? What if the customer at the bar is promising a big tip if it’s loaded with cheese? An extra few ounces won’t be a problem……… ok, that’s an extra 48 cents but this customer is a regular!
With just these basic premises, we’re up to $6.98 on this pizza. If you’re the type of business that can control all these factors every day, have plenty of room for all these bags of stuff, and a very accurate digital scale, I say “ go for it!”
I was speaking with a customer the other day and when we got around to a discussion about how much this perfectly portioned, Giovanni’s Premium Frozen Pizza, ( which is extremely tasty by the way and has a sauce that you’ll never find in a #10 can) the customer exclaimed…………… “Really!” and of course, I immediately assumed they were upset to find out it cost what it did……. But what this customer said is that he figured he had about $8.00 into his pizzas that he was making, which was more than our pizza cost fully prepared & ready to go. His reasoning was simple. He’s struggling to find and keep good help so he adds an employee , an extra, to make pizzas. And he’s factored in waste, etc.
When you work with directly with Giovanni’s Frozen Pizza , or through one of our distributor partners, you’re going to get an amazingly delicious pizza that is portioned exactly every time. No worry that a customer will eat a pizza on one visit, and because a different employee made it the next time, get a totally different pizza the next time. Don’t worry about buying several different bags and boxes, and trying to train everyone to follow the weight charts. Our pizzas will be sitting in your freezer ready to go at any moment. The only problem might be that when you add it all up……….. you might make the same or even slightly more real profit than if you’d had the pleasure and opportunity to make your own.