In this episode of the Pizza Marketplace Podcast, host Mandy Detwiler, editor of Pizza Marketplace, talks to Scott Wiener, director of Slice Out Hunger, about the Pizza Across America even that brings together pizzerias across the country for a good cause.

The week of National Pizza Day, Feb. 9, pizzerias are encouraged to donate 10 pizzas to their local hospitals, first responders, shelters or soup kitchens.

Registration is open now for the event. Every pizzeria who signs up tells the orchestrators how far they deliver and what days they can deliver. Wiener and his team take that data and pull into that destination points charities and hospitals that can receive on one of those days.

"Everything that we do with Slice Out Hunger is always to make life easier for the pizzeria, but still allow them to do the community service that they want to do," Wiener said in the podcast.

To learn more about Pizza Across America, listen to the podcast in its entirety.

In this episode of the Pizza Marketplace Podcast, host Mandy Detwiler, talks to Jennifer Jackson, vice president of public relations for Hungry Howie's.

Jackson spoke about the public relations and advertising the pizza brand does. Hungry Howie's differentiates itself by offering flavored crusts. Jackson said the butter cheese is the top crust flavor, but the brand does unique LTOs like a sweet heat bacon.

Hungry Howie's also has a deep dish pizza and recently launched a Detroit-style pizza. Jackson said Detroit-style pizza accounts for up to 8-9% of pizza sales right now.

"To be an authentic Detroit style, it's having the sauce on the top. And most of the other brands claim it's Detroit style, but it's not, because it doesn't have the sauce on the top," Jackson explained.

The brand's strategy for communicating the brand's commitment to quality ingredients and food preparation standards for the public involves top-quality ingredients and fresh dough.

"We still make our dough fresh in store every single day," Jackson said. "We also use 100 % real mozzarella cheese. I believe we are one of the only brands that can say that we use 100% real mozzarella. Most of them are a blend. A lot of the larger pizza places are now using the frozen dough. So we're going to continue to stand by being that fresh pizza that we want to give our customers. So we'll continue to do that as long as we can."

To learn more about Hungry Howie's operations, growth and public relations success, click the button at the top of the page.

In this episode of the Pizza Marketplace Podcast, Mandy Detwiler, editor of Pizza Marketplace and QSRweb.com, talks to Eric Soller, founder of Old Scratch Pizza in Dayton, Ohio.

With a formal culinary background and years working with mixer giant Hobart, Soller said he was primed and ready to open his own restaurant.

"I love pizza," Soller said. "I was thinking about a lot of things, but I kept coming back to pizza. In my experience with Hobart and then later in sort of corporate world, I traveled quite a bit for work. And when I would go to a city, I would go to three or four pizza places in a night. I'm more of a student of the business.

"I'm more of a restaurateur than I am a pizza chef. I love pizza. I can make pizza. My team is much better at it now than I am. But I saw some concepts out in the world that I thought I could morph into what would be a really great opportunity would eventually turn into Old Scratch Pizza."

The brand uses wood-fired ovens, and Soller calls his pizza "Midwesternly Neapolitan." Soller opened in a mostly industrial area, which he drove past every day coming home from work.

"And I saw that it was a couple of blocks away from our big hospital," Soller said. "It was right around the corner from University of Dayton. It was the it's right on the edge of downtown. It was close enough to University of Dayton Stadium to be one of the closest places with a parking lot to UD Stadium. And I just saw that I saw the potential in it. And, you know, we were pretty busy from day one. We took off right off the bat."

To learn more about Old Scratch Pizza, listen to the podcast in its entirety.