Re: Opening in 3-4 weeks and still have no idea which oven t
What are you selling? Are you selling a specialty pizza that commands premium pricing, or are you selling whatever comes out of the oven for whatever you can get for it?
If you want a $5 14" pizza, you can get as many as you want. If you are willing to pay $10 for the pizza, then you get to be more choosy about what you’re getting.
So, who is your intended audience? If you want to put out a Dominos-quality pizza, do it the way Dominos does it. If you want to put out a better product, you must be better.
There are two extremes. The first is buying pre-made/pre-cut everything and putting it on a conveyor. You are simply assembling the fastest thing possible. The other extreme is slicing every veggie and meat to order, making your own Italian Sausage, using fresh-made cheese, squeezing the tomato yourself. Obviously, most places are the “happy medium”, but that’s their own choice.
How do you determine your own “happy medium”? First and foremost, the amount you can get someone to pay for pizza has to be taken into account. If you’re opening in the center of a trailer park, $20 pizzas ain’t gonna fly.
The Ford Focus has its niche buyer and the Rolls Royce has its niche buyer.
The reality of it all is that you control what the customer receives. An ultra-cheap pizza will sell, and to a lesser degree, a true “work of art” pizza will sell. Ultra-cheap pizza will always outsell premium pizza, but you can charge a premium price for a premium pizza. Food cost from ultra-cheap to premium isn’t that much different, the LABOR is extremely different.
I’ll also dare to say that a Rotoflex is not the BEST pizza oven out there. It’s a REALLY good compromise though. You can’t run a Rotoflex at 800 degrees and you can’t put wood or coal in it. I’d say it’s almost as good as a deck oven (there’s less control as the design’s purpose is to eliminate “hot spots”). So, if one customer wants a really soft, chewy crust and another wants a crackery, crispy crust from the same dough, you’re going to have to manually “override” how it cooks by putting in screens and such. A Rotoflex won’t take the pizza out of the oven either, whereas a conveyor will. There’s significantly less “oven-tending” required with a Rotoflex over a traditional deck oven, but still more than a conveyor.
On the down side, the Rotoflex is a specialty oven, so you don’t find used ones very often and never find them dirt cheap.
