We are embarking on a Heart shaped pizza this year. We have always done them here or there but they looked crud. I picked up the heart template thing this year so we can do a better job. This was my first one so its not great but better than before. I did one last year that looked like a moose head.
Looks better then anything i ever managed
That actually looks really good even the way you cut it looks good. Where did you get the template from?
My mouth is watering!
I’ve tried, but ended up with less than stellar results.
I may do an English-Cut prime rib Saturday to plate that heart shaped. (twin slices plated bottom to bottom to shape a heart)
I am still undecided on that though, I know we’ll be busy, but with current beef prices so high, an ounce or two off target weight hurts us bad with our current cost ration on rib-roasts
We did one the last few years, we just drew a heart on a box and cut it out. Than used the cutter to trim the excess dough (we remixed it the following day so we had no waste) using the heart template as a guide. Really turned out awesome… but a total pain in the ass. The first year we prepped 20 to sell and we told our counter people to upsell them and one guy bought all 20. We ended selling about 30 more so we basically had a full time heart maker and we vowed to be more prepared the next year. So things have been better 
Did anyone else get crazy busy on Valentine’s Day? 2nd biggest day of sales for us besides the Super Bowl. Really thought we’d be slow given the holiday and pizza isn’t exactly the sexiest idea for celebrating. Had a lot of deliveries to lonely souls and full house for dine-in for 3 hours! Big things poppin’ for Grinders Pizzeria in SF!
Ended up doing about $800 in less then 2 hours starting at 530. Alot more deliveries then normal. Then it just dropped like a rock for the rest of the night. Think we did maybe $200 more.
Its generally a pretty good day for us. It depends on what day of the week it lands on. For a Friday or Sat we’ll do about 10% above normal. For a Mon or Tue it will be double the normal sales. We sold about 50 of those heart shaped pizzas. More than I thought we would.
Also 2nd busiest day ever for us. We sure weren’t expecting that!! Of course, Valentine’s Day is cursed and every year it seems to bring a blizzard…
We did better than expected for sales due to subzero temps and windchill warnings.
Had a guy on vacation, newest guy decided to not show up when scheduled, but called in 3 hours later asking to forgive him and for him to come into work, so I ended running the line solo with some limited help from my dish/delivery guy.
My labor cost was stunningly low, thats the only good thing I have to say about the holiday.
It was 90 degrees in SoCal. I’ve had clean and fire up all the AC’s
Apparently a LOT of shops tried the heart-shaped pizzas this year, David – including quite few chains. In our Support dept., call volume was at 120% of forecast last week due to last-minute questions from restaurants adding heart-shaped pizza menu items and coupons, or trying to adjust inventory for these full-priced heart-shaped pies with 2/3 the ingredient usage. Heart crazy.
Jennifer@SpeedLine
I thought of adding an item/size to our slm for it but I felt I was over thinking it. I just added a item note and didn’t worry about the fewer ingredients that were being used.
Also I may come up to the pizza expo. Are you guys going to have anything new that you are going to feature?
Makes sense. The inventory variance was all to the good regardless.
It would be great to see you at Pizza Expo. With the M2 release just out, we’re holding off on the next one for a few more months. Come see some options you may not have considered yet (tablets, customer displays, etc.). We’ll be talking about EMV, new partners and options coming up. And it’s a great opportunity to talk directly with our techs and trainers there, and other users. Ask questions, share tips and ideas.
We were not busy like I thought we were going to be we were just a little slower than a typical saturday but we did have a very busy friday. We only had two requests for heart pizzas. At my previous store it was one of the busiest days of the year and we would get all sorts of requests from heart shapes to writing i love you on pizzas with the toppings. I feel if it wasnt on saturday we would probably be really busy. We are a delco with only 2 tables.