Selling pizza in stadiums and arenas
When you’re building your brand in your local area, there are many traditional ways to do this. Whether it is being entrenched in your community or using the typical forms of advertising. For making a huge impact in brand recognition there may be no bolder move than getting aligned with your local sports organizations and venues. Even if you do not have any major or minor league teams in your area you will have some high school sports that may present some opportunities as well.
We currently have 17 different concession stands spread out over five different venues. They are Acruisure Stadium, (home of the Pittsburgh Steelers and Pitt Panthers) PPG Arena, (home of the Pittsburgh Penguins) PNC Park, (home of the Pittsburgh Pirates) Beaver Stadium (home of the Nittany Lions) and Pegula Ice Arena (home of Penn State Hockey). We have done this all over the course of 18 months. In that 18 months we have gone from people not knowing about us to almost anytime someone sees us in our shirts they at the very least say that they need to eat there, that they have heard about us or someone they know loves our food. We have made a huge mark on Western PA in the form of name recognition.
The Product to Sell in Stadiums
Before we ever spoke to any sports team we had to think about a product that we could sell in the stadiums. I suggest doing your research and trying other pizzas in outside concessions. You don’t want to ruin your brand by putting out an inferior product. The product you sell inside your stores may not be able to be duplicated in a venue that’s not your pizzeria. Inside our pizzeria we never freeze any of our dough. We knew if we could freeze just the shells after we parbake them we would be on our way to having a product that we could sell outside of the restaurant.
From there it was important to use the same sauce, cheese and pepperoni as we do on premise. It was also important to be able to build the pizza on site with fresh product on top of our frozen shell once it was defrosted. The shell that we make is the same dough recipe as we have always used for our five other styles of pizza. Just like the other five styles we use different processes when fermenting and baking the shells.
Once we had the quality where we wanted it we knew we could mass produce the product because we had just purchased a 4,800 square foot commissary building. This gave us the means to produce dough during the day and we have a place to store the shells. With that being said I know of some friends in the industry who overnight produce shells for their other locations at their pizzeria and this same method could work for making shells for outside venues. We use the commissary to mass produce prep for our restaurants and producing the shells for stadiums has offset the cost of the operations of our commissary building.
Staffing & Training at a Concession Venue
Each venue that we operate in has a contract in place. Each venue is a little different, but they are all somewhat the same. In the sense that we sell them the shell. This is how we offset the operations of the commissary building as mentioned above. Then from there we set up a licensing agreement where we get a certain percentage back on each slice of pizza sold. We have no staff operating the booths, we use the vendor staff. The initial thought is how can you monitor quality if your staff is not making the pizzas? We have put forth some proven ways to control the quality. We train all of their supervisors in the very beginning so that they can train their staff. From there we have produced wall charts for all the concession stands that show how to properly prepare the pizzas. We then supply the venue with measuring cups for the cheese and the proper spoodles for the sauce.
Once the training is complete a small team of my employees and myself do go to the first few events at the venue. We never step in and make all the pizzas but we do train and spot check for quality. One of the ways we ensure that our product will be made up to our standards when we are not there is to make their employees feel like our employees. The first thing I do at each new venue is to give them all a Caliente Pin and a Caliente T-Shirt. The leaders of each stand I gave them a $100 Caliente Gift Card. I learned all their names and called them by such when I saw them.
When I took a prospective stadium through one of our existing stadiums they could not believe the camaraderie and love that I had for them and they had for me and my staff. They asked me how often I am there and I told them just in the beginning a few times a year for spot checks. You could tell they care about the product and they care about me. I also make sure I give them all a gift card at Christmas time. If you have read anything I have ever written, you know I am huge on treating people the right way and caring about them before they care about you. The stadiums and outside concessions are no different.
We have learned a lot about being in outside concessions and what I have laid out for you above are the must do’s. The don’t or mistakes along the way that we have made is really not so much on the product end but more on the end of how the deal is structured. There is so much effort that goes into being in stadiums the last thing you want to do is go in and not have proper signage or display of your product. I can not stress enough how important it is to have all your signage details in any contract that you sign. Where all signage will be displayed, who’s paying for it and most importantly who is installing it. I ended up with a huge bill for signage to be installed because I had to use their installers who happened to be union workers. In the end don’t just treat the outside concessions like just an extension of your business, treat it like your business.
Nick Bogacz is the founder and president of Caliente Pizza & Draft House in Pittsburgh. Instagram: @caliente_pizza
