Build your pizzeria website in Peoria
Peoria has been eating pizza since the late 1940s, and its pizzerias run on regulars who have ordered for decades. A website keeps those families, and their children, ordering directly from you, instead of through a delivery app that takes a cut of every pie.
A river city with an early pizza history
Peoria sits on the Illinois River in the middle of the state, and it got pizza earlier than most of the Midwest. By most accounts the first local place to serve it was Romane’s on South Adams in the late 1940s, and the 1950 phone book already listed it. Agatucci’s, a family name in Peoria since 1926, started serving pizza at its tap room on University Street around the same time, and across the river in East Peoria, three Davis brothers opened Davis Bros. in 1948. Some of those names are still part of how Peoria families eat.
The city around them has changed. Caterpillar, for decades the defining employer, moved its headquarters away in 2018. Today OSF HealthCare, headquartered here since 1877, is the largest employer, and Bradley University sits on the bluff in the Moss-Bradley neighborhood. Peoria eats around hospital shifts and the academic year as much as factory whistles.
Keep the next generation ordering from you
Longtime customers know your number. Their children search on their phones, and if a delivery app comes up first, it takes a commission on an order your history already earned. Your own site tells your story, shows your pie in real photos, and takes the order at your counter price. You keep the customer’s name and usual order, so they can come back in two taps and hear from you directly about a new pie.
Shifts and semesters
A hospital the size of OSF’s runs around the clock, and night-shift staff want food at hours when most kitchens are winding down. Online ordering on your own site takes those orders whenever you are open, for a set pickup time, paid ahead. A unit ordering for the whole floor is placing a big ticket, and on your site none of it goes to a platform.
Bradley students order through apps by default. A deal that only works on your site, a QR code on every box and a reorder button can move them over for the rest of their degree. And when summer empties the campus, your customer list is how you reach the families in the Uplands and the West Bluff who keep ordering. Keep the apps for discovery, and put your own link on every box so the next order comes straight to you.