Buffalo, N.Y. (WBEN) - Today is the day. Thursday is the big game day as the Bills take on the Rams in Los Angeles and for your favorite pizza places in Buffalo, it is going to be exceptionally busy.
Franco's Pizzerias are taking orders ahead of time, "People have started placing their orders actually last week," Marketing Director for Franco's Pizza Walter Smietana said. "The way we see this playing out is very similar to a Super Bowl, where we'll be very busy around dinnertime or even like earlier afternoon, or later afternoon and dinnertime."
"We'll do a shift after we close our normal business to prepare," says Jim Pacciotti, owner of Bocce's Club Pizza.
"We are anticipating what I deem as a 'Mini Super Bowl,' because everybody's been looking forward to this game. TV games are even busier than home games, because we don't have people going out the stadium. We're preparing already, as far as getting a ton of wing sauce made, we're pre-counting, everything to try to make it go as smooth as possible."
It's not unlikely that Bocce may limit the orders at times, "We'll have to limit the orders because we can only promise what I can cook, which I do on Super Bowl Sunday. It's all gonna come at once because everyone's gonna want their pizza for kickoff," Pacciotti notes.
When do the supplies get ordered for the football season? For Franco's, they plan two weeks in advance.
"We we need that extra time. So we order the extra ingredients ahead of time and it all came in this week. We've all got it staged and the teams were in today [Wednesday, Sept. 7th] working on getting the dough ready for tomorrow," says Smietana.
Franco's works with a local food distributor so they never worry about running out of fresh ingredients, they just need a full 24 hours to prepare their fresh dough.
Pacciotti says that there is going to be a significant increase in orders compared to a typical Thursday night. Wing orders are expected to quadruple and party pizzas sales should increase significantly as well, "It's really a big increase, especially with how good they're [Buffalo Bills] are supposed to be this year, They're predicted to win the Super Bowl. Everybody's very, very hyped up for them."
Labor shortages are still prevalent in the nation as we continue to recover from the pandemic. For Bocce, they had to shut down on Labor Day to give his workers a good rest after Wing Fest last weekend.
"It's an epidemic. I had to give my good people a rest because what ends up happening is, you end up burning out all your good people because you don't have a lot of staff. It's nothing I've seen in 40 years in this business, where you can't find workers. It's truly a tough time for staffing," said Pacciotti.
Franco's says staffing hasn't been what is was pre-pandemic and for a brief period of time had a limited menu but have reverted back to the full menu.
