Build your pizzeria website in Downey
Downey helped invent American fast food, and the chains have never left. A neighborhood pizzeria wins here by being the local name families know, and a website is how they find you, order directly at your own price, and come back without a delivery app taking a cut.
A city that made fast food, and spacecraft
Downey sits about 13 miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles, between the Rio Hondo and the San Gabriel River. It has an unusual place in American history: the world’s oldest operating McDonald’s, opened in 1953 at Florence Avenue and Lakewood Boulevard, is here, Taco Bell traces part of its origin story to the city, and the aerospace plant that built Apollo spacecraft operated here until 1999. That site is now the Columbia Memorial Space Center and shopping centers.
Today Downey is a city of about 114,000 people, three in four of them Hispanic or Latino, and Kaiser Permanente and Rancho Los Amigos are its biggest employers. Pizza is mostly a chain story along Firestone and Lakewood boulevards. The independents, like Avenue Pizzeria in the older downtown stretch of Downey Avenue and Pregio, hold on through neighborhood loyalty.
Be the Downey answer
DoorDash and Uber Eats treat Downey as part of a dense southeast L.A. market. A customer in North Downey searching for pizza is shown places from South Gate, Bellflower and Norwalk, often sorted by who pays for promotion. If they find you, the app takes a commission. Your own site ranks for pizza in Downey and near Downey Avenue, shows your real pies and takes the order at your counter price.
Families and hospital shifts
Families here order for a crowd: birthdays in Gallatin or Appleby, a Sunday with the cousins, a game night. Through an app, each of those orders pays a percentage, and many owners raise app prices to compensate. On your own site, the menu price is the same everywhere, you can write your specials in English and Spanish, and a parent reorders the usual in seconds.
Hospital staff at Kaiser and Rancho Los Amigos work around the clock. Online ordering on your own site lets them order at the end of a shift or for a whole unit, choose a pickup time and pay ahead. Keep the apps for discovery if they help, and put your own ordering link on every box so the next order comes straight to you.