We used to sell Grab & Go slices at Lunchtime before the pandemic, but took that opportunity to stop - we priced them too low, had too much waste, and could not find staff to work lunch kitchen. Now we’re looking into restarting but wanting to set it up with as little effort needed by the staff as possible.
We used to wrap each slice individually with a piece of wax paper and foil to keep our packaging costs as low as possible. Our pan-style pizza is already “soft crust” and the way this method steamed the slices actually kept them great over the course of an hour + lunch service. Staff just had to grab the ordered slices, throw them in a bag, and hand them to the customer. It was a lot of work to wrap all of them before lunch started. Since it was a huge pain if we had to cook more during lunch the staff would always cook the maximum amount and this resulted in a lot of waste on slower-than-expected days.
We looked into par baking the pies in our conveyor oven set up half time for breadsticks then finishing individual slices with a 2nd pass through. Quality was great, but this method results in a 6 minute wait for each order. That might mean customers pile up in our small waiting area and the staff has to remember which slices coming out belong to which customer. On busy catering days, the cut table would be annoyed with handling the little orders as they’re trying to assembly line out the multi-pizza waves. This would be the way we’d have to do it if we wanted to sell slices all day instead of just 11 a.m to 1 p.m.
Now we’re thinking that investing a bit into slice display cabinets with humidity control for our front counters is the way to go. Slices will be on display and hot & ready. Customer can see what is available, point out which varieties they want, we throw the entire order in a clamshell, and they’re out the door. Cutting the occasional pizza into 8 for slices seems to flow better for the cut table during a lunch rush.
Now we just have to decide if we want to go back to wrapping slices, or invest in cabinets and running some high amp electricity to the counters.
