Local company taking fresh road to the top
By Heather Ruenz
Editor
Scott Gittrich has been thinking outside of the box – pizza box, that is – for more than 20 years. And while many things have changed as Toppers Pizza has grown, one thing hasn’t – his passion.
“We have great team members everywhere – youthful energy, great people and a great culture. The key is having that magic and passion while focusing on the customer,” Gittrich, founder and president of Toppers Pizza, said.
Though the company officially got its start in Champagne, Ill., in 1991, Gittrich, a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, said the move to Whitewater was a fluke but brought with it a welcome fresh start.
“We opened up here in 1993 after Domino’s closed. We had been known as a cheap pizza place in Champagne but here we decided to do it right and it took off,” Gittrich said.
Sticking with the original plan of offering fresh pizza made with fresh ingredients, Toppers Pizza differentiated itself from others in the business with toppings not previously associated with pizza.
Sure, they offer typical pizzas – Old School Sausage and Pepperoni, Meat Topper and a Veggie Classic to name a few – but the Mac ‘N Cheese, Buffalo Chicken Topper and Cool C-B-R (chicken-bacon-ranch) pizzas are popular favorites.
“While other pizza joints are kind of one in the same, we’re different. It’s a sense of pride in all of our stores that our food is fresh,” Gittrich said.
It’s not just the toppings and sauce that are fresh.
“We make our dough from scratch in our stores every day. It’s made from high gluten, spring wheat flour. We think people disrespect gluten,” Gittrich said with a smile.
To keep things fresh means coming up with flavors each year. Currently, there are three such offerings on the Toppers Pizza menu – Three Little Pigs, El Cubano and Loaded Tot-zza.
“The new pizzas are what we’re all about,” Gittrich said. “Bold, fun flavors and unusual combinations.”
Despite being a pizza place, the “claim to fame” for Toppers is not pizza at all but their cheesy breadsticks, aptly named Topperstix.
“We meet people all of the time who say, ‘We ate Toppers when I was a kid but I never had the pizza because all we ate was Topperstix.’ They’re our signature item.” Gittrich said.
Leap of faith
While he had big dreams of turning Toppers Pizza into an empire, Gittrich said the company took its first leap from an unexpected request.
“A student delivering for us came to me and said, ‘I want to open a Toppers,’ and I thought, ‘Well all right,’” he explained.
Toppers Pizza currently has 22 franchises making up 50 stores in 10 states. But Toppers, according to Gittrich, is a Wisconsin company and proud of it. Numerous franchise owners are graduates of UW-Whitewater and 100 percent of the cheese used comes from Cedarburg.
Read the complete story on Toppers Pizza in this week’s issue of the Whitewater Register.
