By Dave Fidlin
Correspondent
The head of the Whitewater-based Toppers pizza chain said he remains committed to calling the city home in the road ahead.
Scott Gittrich, who relocated Toppers to Whitewater in 1993 and has maintained company headquarters in the city in the more than quarter-century since, said there are no plans of uprooting company operations.
“Toppers Pizza is not moving from Whitewater or our current building. Period,” Gittrich wrote in an email Dec. 9.
Gittrich’s email to the Whitewater Register came in response to a Nov. 28 article in the newspaper about the company’s current headquarters, 325 W. Center St., potentially serving as a site for a future grocer.
The recent Register article touched on Whitewater municipal government’s ongoing efforts to bring a full-service grocer back into the local retail landscape.
City Manager Cameron Clapper at a Nov. 21 Community Development Authority meeting said he had been in touch with Toppers officials about the company’s short- and long-term plans at the Center Street property, which previously housed such grocers as Supervalu and A&P.
Gittrich in his email this week said the article “conveys to the community in which I live and work and have built a national business from that we are leaving or, at best, that we might.”
In his email, Gittrich repeatedly emphasized that the mere suggestion of his leaving Whitewater is baseless.
“That’s simply not true,” he wrote. “There are people that are going to believe that our connection to Whitewater is tenuous, and it’s not.”
Gittrich’s foray into running a pizzeria began in 1991 when he opened a store in Champaign, Ill. Two years later, he opened a second location, in Whitewater, and established the corporate operations — dubbed by the company as its “world headquarters” – within the community.
In the decades since, Toppers locations have opened in other locales across Wisconsin in addition to other states.
