Politics & Government
Homemade Pizza Co. Slated to Come to Main Street
New shop would allow customers to buy prepared but uncooked pizzas, as well as salads, cookies and ice cream.
A new shop, where people can purchase on-the-spot prepared and uncooked pizzas, may be coming to Chatham Borough soon.
A representative from the Chicago-based Homemade Pizza Co. attended the last borough planning board meeting to discuss the company’s application to take over the currently empty business space on the corner of Main and Center streets.
Unlike traditional pizza shops, the pizzas that would be sold at Homemade Pizza Co. would not be cooked but only prepared for purchasers to bake at home. In fact, the shop will not have any ovens or ranges on which to cook.
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“The main product is pizza, but it doesn’t come in a box,” said Joanna Kolakowski, the company’s director of architecture and development. “It’s not going to slide, and it’s not going to spill with goo and oil.”
And unlike already-prepared pizzas purchased at grocery stores, the product is never frozen, with all of the dough and fixings compiled on the spot once the pizza is ordered and seal-wrapped for customers to see the product they ordered.
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Kolakowski said all of the ingredients are preservative-free and will be supplied by local vendors.
“The owners make a point of hiring local,” Kolakowski said. “Whatever [food products] we can get locally, we will pull it from the local market. The idea is to adapt into a city and make sure we give to it as much as the community gives back to us.”
In addition to hiring local vendors, Kolakowski said the store, which would be open seven days a week from 1 to 9 p.m., would employ eight workers from the area—a store manager, team leader and six part-time employees—with four staffing the store at any time.
In addition to pizza, the store will sell three other major products—salads, prepared but unbaked cookies and ice cream—all of which will be prepared and wrapped for customers to take out of the store to either be eaten or cooked first elsewhere.
Although the store would technically be a food and beverage establishment, Kolakowski repeated many times that there would be no eating on the premises, with no tables and chairs—only a bench for customers to wait for their orders—available either inside or outside.
In addition to customer pick-up, the Homemade Pizza Co. would also offer delivery service, with orders being taken via phone and online and completed within 15 minutes, according to Kolakowski.
The planning board, which motioned to approve the change of permitted use from its previous function as a clothing retailer, posed a few questions to Kolakowski, including concerns about the specifications for requested signs, parking and how and when the food products would be delivered.
Board member H.H. Montague had a problem with the suggested vendor delivery times, which the application stated as being between 4:30 and 6 a.m. so that, as Kolakowski suggested, it would not impact morning rush hour traffic.
However, Montague explained that the tenants living above the store might be woken up by the sounds of unloading trucks and suggested the drop-offs start after 6 a.m.
“If that’s the regulation we have to comply with, we definitely will comply,” Kolakowski said. “Each vendor has their own key and is responsible for opening the space, putting the food in [the walk-in cooler] and making sure it is located where it needs to be.”
If the store opens on Main Street, it will be the Homemade Pizza Co.’s 34th in the country, including 16 stores in Chicago, six in Washington, D.C., and two in New York. The company has been in existence for nearly 15 years.
It will be one of the first in the state, after one opened in Ridgewood earlier in the month and construction started on a site in Westfield. Kolakowski said the non-franchised company is also looking into prospective sites in Millburn, Summit and Montclair.
With the application obtaining initial approval from the planning board, it will now have to pass through several committees, including the sign committee and Board of Health, before finally being accepted.