Operations

Karvelas Pizza Co. focuses on scratch-made food, customer service

Karvelas Pizza Co. makes a splash in small-town Georgia with food made from scratch, a focus on customer service and a training program designed to help employees level up.

Photo: Karvelas Pizza Co.

January 18, 2024 by Mandy Wolf Detwiler — Editor, Networld Media Group

Georgia-based Karvelas Pizza Co. had no reason to fail. Founder Joey Karvelas grew up in the restaurant business, and his father owned a pizza shop while he was a kid. Karvelas washed dishes there when he was 12, and he spent his formative years working in the pizzeria until his father had a stroke and the pizzeria was sold.

"That's all I really know how to do," Karvelas said. "My dad taught me a lot about the numbers, on food costs and labor costs. I didn't really get it back then. I didn't understand it. But as I got my own opportunity, I knew that stuff. That was the glue to being profitable and being able to make it work."

Joey Karvelas started Karvelas Pizza Co. in Georgia. Photo: Karvelas Pizza Co.

Karvelas picked up a talent for cooking and a taste for good food. He paired that with working for some smart businesspeople and talented chefs from Greece and Long Island, working around restaurants in the southeast.

Karvelas' father passed away in 2013, and the last thing he told his son was that he needed to open his own pizza shop. Karvelas took his father's advice, borrowed some money, and in 2014 he bought his dad's original pizzeria back, changed the name, and began using the recipes he'd honed.

"Really, I started crafting it there," Karvelas added. "It was my shop, and I was really able to start homing in on recipes. … We're talking about a little dive. It was a 900-square-foot takeout and delivery place and people started showing up wanting to eat there."

He built a bar inside the pizzeria with a few seats and put picnic tables outside.

"I finally made a decision to cut delivery out," Karvelas said. "People told me I was going to go out of business, but I just started focusing on dine-in."

Business picked up, and four years into the project he talked one of his brothers into leaving a corporate job at FedEx to come work for Karvelas Pizza Co. His skillset was people, Karvelas said, and his leadership abilities were second to none.

Together, they moved the original location to a bigger spot in Hogansville, Georgia, and found immediate success. They opened seven days a week for lunch and dinner, and a year later opened a second location in Lagrange, Georgia.

A third location opened a year after the second, and today the company boasts five restaurants. A sixth will open this spring.

On the menu

Karvelas deliberately keeps his menu small.

"I take a lot of pride in my menu because it's incredible food," he said. "It's made from scratch – there are no freezers in the restaurants whatsoever. Everything's made from scratch. And it's hard to scale that. It's easy to do one location, but when you start trying to open up multiple, you get nervous that people aren't going to be able to make the product right. That's one of the tricks to what we do — that makes us so powerful."

Pizza dough is made from scratch and has a three-day rise. The team also makes sauce with tomatoes from Italy and uses high-quality cheese that Karvelas said is "the best cheese on the market." It's a traditional New York-style crust and is stretched thin into 16-inch pizzas. Karvelas said it's the style he's most familiar with and has the most confidence in. He's worked in places that sell Detroit-style, Sicilian, and Grandma pizzas, and there's a lot of work that goes into making those.

"I wanted to keep it simple," Karvelas added. Offering one size helps with the ease of the menu. Pizzas bake in deck ovens.

Chicken comes from a local factory in North Georgia and is antibiotic- and steroid-free.

Potatoes are brought in from Idaho, are cut up in-house, and soak for three days. They're triple fried so they're crispy but yet creamy on the inside, and they're topped with a house-made seasoning.

"There's a lot of pride and a lot of time that goes into this extremely powerful menu," Karvelas added. "The flavor, too — it just explodes in your mouth. Everything is made by someone with extreme talent in making sure everything tastes delicious. And people buy into it."

Chicken is hand-cut into tenders that are like the brand's boneless wings, and Karvelas Pizza Co. offers 13 different wing sauces that are Karvelas' own recipes.

The easy menu also helps with retention, as employees master the menu better and don't constantly need training on new menu items.

"I take pride in being able to make something from scratch that you can't get anywhere else," Karvelas said. "It means a lot to me, and I want to share it with the world."

Consistency is simple: It's keeping the same kitchen layout if possible and using the same equipment and products across the brand. Prep cooks and kitchen cooks differ in the pizzerias. Karvelas said the prep cooks are a "huge part of the success," when it comes to continuity across the brand.

"They're doing everything where the flavor comes in," he added. "They're going by that recipe."

Photo: Karvelas Pizza Co.

Operations

Karvelas visits the restaurants and tastes the food himself, and he said it's the same experience across the board. He shoots for 23% in labor costs, and he has weekly meetings with his managers where they go over prime cost numbers and examine each individual line item.

"I think you have to set yourself a goal every week and be realistic about it," he added. "How many percentage points are you willing to put towards labor? What's good for your business?"

Karvelas said his brand doesn't have a lot of competition, because they're situated in small towns and no other pizza brands are doing what Karvelas Pizza Co. is doing in terms of scratch-made food and great customer service. People want their food to be made fast and consistently, and if you can provide those attributes, people will come eat.

There's an order to his employees, and he has a level system in the kitchen. Level one cooks start on the fryer. Level two cooks learn how to top pizzas. Level three cooks learn how to run the fry side lead, including plating and calling out orders. Level four cooks know how to stretch dough, place it on the peel and work the oven. Level fives are assistant managers, and the final level are managers.

"If you're getting on the oven, you're pretty far up the chain," Karvelas said, "so you should have a lot of experience, you've seen it in action a lot. So, you're not there day one just getting pizzas out of the oven. It's a pretty strenuous training process. It takes about a year to get through, if not longer for some people."

About Mandy Wolf Detwiler

Mandy Wolf Detwiler is the managing editor at Networld Media Group and the site editor for PizzaMarketplace.com and QSRweb.com. She has more than 20 years’ experience covering food, people and places.

An award-winning print journalist, Mandy brings more than 20 years’ experience to Networld Media Group. She has spent nearly two decades covering the pizza industry, from independent pizzerias to multi-unit chains and every size business in between. Mandy has been featured on the Food Network and has won numerous awards for her coverage of the restaurant industry. She has an insatiable appetite for learning, and can tell you where to find the best slices in the country after spending 15 years traveling and eating pizza for a living.

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