Toppers Pizza featured in QSR Magazine

Reporter Sam Oches of QSR, a restaurant industry trade publication, spoke with Scott Iversen about Toppers Pizza’s new focus on franchise development. The new direction focuses on attracting multi-unit operators who have a diverse portfolio of restaurant experience. Toppers has also hired two new key employees to round up its team: Brett Larrabee, formerly on the 5 Guys Burgers & Fries franchise development team and Curtis White, formerly with Quizno’s on the operations end. The strategic short term goal is for 100 units by the end of 2013 and the long term plan is to have 500 locations by 2020. Check out the article to learn more about Toppers growth.

Toppers Lays Out Plans for Accelerated Growth
By Sam Oches

Toppers Pizza announced that, as a means to accelerate growth, the company will start focusing on employing multiunit franchisees with diverse portfolios instead of single-unit operators.

The 28-unit, Whitewater, Wisconsin–based brand is aiming to have 100 units open and operating by 2013, says director of marketing Scott Iversen.
(Read More)

Toppers Pizza featured in Entrepreneur Magazine

Toppers Pizza, the 28-unit eclectic pizza franchise based in Whitewater, WI, scored a spot in Entrepreneur Magazine’s “Nine Notable Pizza Entrepreneurs." Gittrich turned down two Domino’s locations to start up his own version of a pizza concept which has blown competition out of the water in terms of sales. Check out the Toppers Pizza roundup here!

Nine Notable Pizza Entrepreneurs
By Jason Fell

Whether you love it, or only sorta love it, pizza is big business. Over any two-week period, nearly two-thirds of Americans will eat some form of pizza, either frozen or at a restaurant, according to consumer-marketing research firm the NPD Group. Overall, pizza is the sixth-most popular dinner entree in the U.S. That's a lotta dough. From pizza trainers to eco-friendly pizzerias and big franchises, we serve up some of the most innovative entrepreneurs who have taken a bite of the giant pizza market over the years.

(Read More)

Toppers Q&A featured in Entrepreneur Magazine

Reporter Jason Daley of Entrepreneur Magazine sat down with successful Toppers Pizza franchisee Dave Gilewski to learn about how he has managed to generate $600,000 sales in the first six months of opening his location in Franklin, WI. What resulted was a Q&A called “Special Delivery: A Wisconsin franchisee discovers the secret behind a pizza chain’s unparalleled popularity and makes a bundle in the bargain,” that published in the May edition of Entrepreneur Magazine. Gilewski talks candidly about Toppers Pizza’s culture, his entrepreneur story and the food that started it all at Toppers Pizza. View the full article below!

Toppers Q&A featured in Entrepreneur Magazine

Toppers Pizza featured in Nation's Restaurant News

Toppers Pizza Marketing Manager Bridget Keeler spoke with Nation’s Restaurant News reporter Mark Brandau about how Toppers uses Social Media to create and drive the brand’s advertising for an article in Nation’s Restaurant News called “Collaborative Spirit.” In Toppers' latest contest, it asks Facebook fans to design a car wrap. The winner selected could potentially see a ’74 Mercury Grand Marquis driving around town with his or her design wrapped on the car. View the full article below, or click here!

Toppers Pizza featured in Nation's Restaurant News

Toppers Pizza featured in QSR

Toppers Pizza was recently featured in QSR. In the QSR article called “Battling Back Against Winter,” which published April 8, Adam Oldenburg of Toppers Pizza describes how Toppers embraces the winter weather and in doing so has made a name for being the place to go during winter storms. In the article, Adam says that winter snow days can double sales easily at all 28 Toppers Pizza locations and that Toppers has become known as the place to go during a storm. Click here to view the full article

Battling Back Against Winter: Quick serves find ways to fight off the winter blues as signs of spring approach.
By Mary Avant

Since mid-December, seven major snow storms have hit states all over the U.S., from the Northeast to the West Coast and everywhere in between.

This bleak weather “has literally dimmed the bulb on the restaurant business pretty much across the board,” says David Crane, CEO of BlueSky Local, a slow sales response solution for restaurants.

(Read More)

UWM Students Review Toppers in The Daily Cardinal

Toppers Pizza is known for connecting with the college demographic. Recently, UWM students, Eamon Hegarty and Matt Payne reviewed Toppers Pizza for the UWM publication, The Daily Cardinal. The review analyzes and praises Toppers' unique menu and friendly staff! Toppers continues to be a leader in the 18-34 demographic and testimonials like this continue to strengthen the brand. A portion of the article is below and it can be read in its entirety by clicking here.

Toppers: Better than bartime
By Eamon Hegarty & Matt Payne

Pizza and beer. For decades, the staple foods of young scholars have been this simple. While recent years have seen a rise in the number of health-conscious individuals, for many nothing is more welcome at 2 a.m. than a delicious pizza covered in an assortment of meats, cheeses and veggie toppings. For such occasions, Toppers Pizza on Regent Street is our favorite. Why? We admit that there are a number of outstanding pizza joints in Madison, and although Toppers offers an exceptional standard assortment, there are two menu items which make them unique.

The first, and by far our favorite, are Topperstix. Sure, other restaurants have their own version of cheesy breadsticks, but no one makes them as well as Toppers. The cheese is fresh and delicious. The dough's texture is soft and chewy without being underdone. It's like combining the best part of a cheese pizza with the best part of a breadstick. Furthermore, you can order three dipping sauces to make these "stix" even more enjoyable.

The second thing Toppers has working in their favor is their house pizzas. Although they're little more expensive, they ‘re worth every penny, particularly if you're in the mood for more than bar-time food. From the Taco Topper to the Smokey BBQ Chicken, Toppers has something for every palate. Next to the Mac ‘N Cheese pizza, our favorite was the Potato Topper. This pizza consists of baked potatoes with mozzarella and cheddar cheeses sprinkled with bacon bits and green onions. On the side, Toppers offers the perfect palate cleanser of sour cream for a dipping sauce. This unusual yet ingenious mixture is truly mouth-watering and provides something that both pizza loving individuals and partygoers will enjoy.

(Read More)

Q&A with Toppers' Marketing/Social Media Manager, Bridget Keeler

Recently, we sat down with our Marketing/Social Media Manager, Bridget Keeler, and asked her a few questions about social media. This revolutionary tool gives us the power to consistently interact with our following and also continues to grow our brand. See the full transcript of the interview below:

Can you describe some of Toppers goals and initiatives with social media? Why and how are you using social media to accomplish these goals?

Toppers Pizza puts an extremely high value on listening to what our customers are telling us. Our goal with social media is to give customers what they want. Recently, we were looking to add another House Pizza to our menu. We developed a crowd sourcing contest, Spank Your Pizza, which challenged fanatics to come up with the next pizza for our menu – then paired down more than 100 submissions to 64 finalists who battled it out for three weeks to make it to the top two. The contest generated some delicious pizza ideas and grew our Facebook Fan page by 62% over the course of contest.

Future goals and initiatives include creating apps that will engage our fanatics and continue to build our loyal community. We believe our fanatics are truly interested in the Toppers brand and want to be a part of shaping its success. To further measure that passionate loyalty, we will also be heavily promoting our mobile food truck via social media and will be eventually looking for fanatics to dictate where it shows up to next.

The cool thing about social media is that Toppers has the ability to change the conversation in the pizza industry by engaging and listening to our fanatics. Anyone with an idea worth sharing has the ability to influence the conversation at anytime.

With over 1,000 fans per location, how do you consistently interact and engage your fanatics?

We make it our goal to engage our fanatics multiple times during the day through our posts. These posts can range anywhere from asking them to comment on their favorite dipping sauce, to posting relevant pop culture trends. We like to believe that our fanatics see our page as being similar to hanging out in a room with their friends and having a good time.

We also have a weekly promotion, called “Toppers Tuesdays”, that gives our fanatics exclusive deals on Tuesdays only at any Toppers location. These deals are only found on our social media pages and build specials bonds with us and our fanatics. Deals can range from buy one get one deals to special pricing on regular menu items.

Local Toppers stores also dive into interacting with fanatics on our pages by offering specials to fanatics in their area. Between national and local specials, Toppers is continuously thanking and rewarding our fanatics.

How do you measure social media? (Try and think Return on Engagement – ROI is difficult to measure, etc.)

Toppers is dedicated to making our fanatics happy. We measure social media through return on engagement. Measurement comes in the form of comments, impressions, @mentions, repeat posters, popular posts, and overall brand awareness. Our first and foremost goal is to post content that captures our fanatics attention and gets them talking. While it’s easy to count the measurements mentioned above, our measurement is a constant work in progress as we decipher and understand how social media engagement affects us at every level. Our ultimate goal is to find the connection and balance between social media and our P&L to help determine and set expectations to our social media strategy prior to engagement.

If you could give one piece of advice to business looking to take the jump into social media, what would you say?

If you are looking to take the jump into social media, my advice is to take a big running leap and continue looking ahead. I believe that social media has replaced face to face conversations and is quickly becoming the norm for communication, especially among Toppers’ demographic. The key is constant, consistent, engaging communication. Social media is changing the world by the hour, while you don’t need to be the star on the conversation – you at least need to be part of it.