We generally rotate our core menus to keep our food offerings fresh and innovative. Most often, we just go about changes without much fanfare.

At times, we need to highlight some of the uniqueness we do feature. This is one of the times. The challenge was to put a fresh spin on our pizza station. In past renditions we just changed the toppings. Or changed the way we stretched the doughs into rustic oblong, but still round pizzas. Well, we shifted gears in the newest iteration of our pizza module. We went square! and now, Square is the new round. So cool to be square.

And that’s what I felt needed to be conveyed as a simple marketing quip.

Creating a fresh new look was not the only factor that went into thinking outside the box. There was a conflict needing attention as well. We always tried to consider the time it took to take the pizza dough from its raw uncooked form and actually cook it with its toppings. It takes much too long. Particularly when we have queues of customers waiting. Well, that’s not acceptable. So we par-cooked off the dough and cut down on some time. But it still was a wait. We looked at having pizzas already cooked off. And again, we missed the mark; overproduction, waste and quality of product all made for some seriously flawed solutions. Also, finding a crisp, cracker like crust was difficult to achieve do to the time constraints we were under.

All this changed with the square. What did we do? Well quite simply we took a pre-made square flatbread and started the process there. We cut down the pizza baking down to 4-5 minutes, depending on the amount of toppings on the flatbread crust. The crispness and texture of the crust is perfect. In a stone oven, at 475 degrees, a piping hot square pizza is just a matter of minutes.
Our customers seem quite pleased with the end result.

So far as the design and artwork for Pie are Square are concerned. I reached back deep into my school days, where we were taught the formula for determining the area of a circle. Or just the mathematical importance of pi. (So, see Mrs. Ladiano? I actually found a use for my mathematical prowess.)

We addressed speed, quality and creativity with going Square. Well done.

Categories: Lunch