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10/12/2007 | Testimonial: Scott Hack, co-owner, Fast Break Pizza,
Crestwood
,
Ky.
My business partner, Rob, and I have been to the show four of the last five years. When our business was new, we went primarily for the Pizza Pizzazz competition. But over the last couple of years, we’ve gone looking for new products we could use to expand our menu.
We found a fully prepared, cooked pasta that we started using. It’s really saved us a lot of prep work and makes things a lot easier in the kitchen. It’s not always easy to find things like that if you don’t go to tradeshows. We also have been playing with a pesto sauce that we found at the show, and we plan to use it on our pizzas.
This year we also went to the Saturday workshops, where four operator experts spoke. At the time, we were looking to expand our game room, so I was really interested in hearing what Paul Connor had to say about the positives and drawbacks of redemption games. He’d done a lot of that in his own operation.
Another operator expert, Michael Shepherd, talked about working on your relationship with your distributor. A key point Michael made was that your distributor relationship isn’t all about price, that good service has to come into it. He said that if you’re just focusing on price with distributors, at some point your prices were going to go up and you’d be looking to go somewhere else. He talked about how it’s so much more productive to establish a long-term relationship when you can. That was really helpful to us because, at the time, we were looking to change our primary distributor. We used the information we got in that session to help with the transition.
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