Is there anyone who wholly uses no prep ingredients, cheese, and doughballs? Does the cost vs labor to prep balance out?
anyone?
i guess we are all too busy making our own dough 
LOL… I found that quite funny actually.
i knew asking about pre done doughballs would not get a flood of positive responses. when i had my place i use to do it all the “old school” way from scratch. i would make my own dough, grate my own cheese from bricks and go to the produce market and dice the onions myself, ect.
i just thought that maybe since i see so much dough coming from the food warehouse (yes mostly the big chains) that maybe it caught on in my absence. i know prep work is time and labor intensive, but it did not take a lot of arm twisting to go from block cheese to pre-shredded cheese and pre-diced onions (especially) just stricter portion control.
We are a family restaurant that serves pizza as another item, no the main attraction. We also are pretty small and do a tremendous take out and delivery business with about 46 seats on two levels. I use doughballs from Utica NY, Grande out of a bag and make our own pizza sauce in a Middleby. All my cooks ages 16 to 46 can make pizza which eliminates the “pizza guy” factor we have in our area that demand 100$ a shift. We only have two sizes, 16" family and 10" personal with no slices. I get a premium price for my area, 10.95 and 4.95. I advertise heavily that I use Grande and just started to introduce stuffed crust pizza. I’m the only one in town that didn’t jump on the “two large pies for 15.99 with a free 2litre”. At first our sales dropped, but now my pizza sales are increasing at about 15% a month and my comment cards are reflecting a very positive response on our integrity to sticking with premium ingredients. This is my experience, I’m sure artisan shops have different responses. My two cents, I’m out!
i only bring up the dough because i remembered times when someone would start dough and get called away to answer phones or whatever and forget the dough to come back to soup. or they get it on the table to start cutting/rolling and get called away and it over rises. not that it happended everyday, but when it did it was a pain and it made the product not consistent. even adding too much or too little water can ruin a batch if someone is not paying close attention.
now everyone has cell phones, ipods it is easy to get distracted from watching dough or remember how much water you added.
even with guidelines and procedures you will still get from time to time and inconsistent product. i don’t think anyone still stomps their own tomatotes bare foot for pizza sauce do they? 
We make everything we can ourselves because thats our business model. It is the type of product our customer have come to expect. It is not easily replicated over multiple locations, and requires a lot of attention to detail.
If your business model involves consistant product over multiple locations, or requires even requires one unit to operate regularly in your absence, then more pre-made products will be more desirable.
I will add, that I believe there might be something I call the Food Network Effect. Customers see an independent pizzeria, equate it to what they have seen on TV, and possibly assume there is a family involved, maybe old family recipes, and some pizza guy who’s dream it was to own a pizzeria and toss dough in the air. I think if you try to perpetuate that image, you need to be sure your quality reflects that image, including great tasting dough.
I’ll get off my soapbox now, and go watch Idol on the TIVO.