This is part of a year-long ‘Love for Local’ series called NB365: portraits of New Brunswick entrepreneurs, businesses and organizations. Huddle is a media partner with Love for Local. Today, we hear from Janice MacPherson And Keith Dunphy of Pomodori Pizzeria in Saint John.
We love great food and we love finding local gems to eat at. Before we opened Pomodori, we had a hard time finding a great place to take our young family for a quick meal that was delicious and also good for us.
We created Pomodori in 2008 with made-to-order, Neapolitan-style pizzas, creative salads, and house-made gelato in a unique quick-serve environment. We wanted it to be delicious, crave-able food that is also good for you.
Growing a business is never easy but it is a great way to challenge yourself to make a difference in the communities where you live and work. We want to be able to deliver better food to more people, which helps us plan for growth from right here in New Brunswick. Thirteen years later we continue to work toward that goal.
As a small business, we rely on three key markets to help us become who we want to be: our team, our customers and our suppliers.
We hire many young staff and provide them their first job experience. We teach hands-on skills, give them autonomy, help them build a strong work ethic and understand the importance of the customer experience.
Our customers live right in our communities. As with every restaurant in the province, we rely on our communities to buy from us and we are thankful to our loyal fan base who support us week after week–and our suppliers are those providing us with the quality raw ingredients for which we can create our products.
From Mirage foods for our produce, Dolphin Village for specialty products, to Elke’s for our pepperoni and sausage and Speerville Flour mill for our custom whole wheat flour, to name a few, we have enjoyed long-standing relationships with those companies and we continually seek out where and how we can partner with other local companies.
Supporting local business has a real impact because that support goes deeper than the surface: it is not just a great pizza or gelato our customers buy, they are helping support 60 jobs in New Brunswick across our 3 locations along with many regional and local suppliers and their employees.
Supporting local also allows companies like ours to continue to innovate and hopefully grow enough to have a greater impact in more communities in the things we are passionate about, which just happens to be delicious food that is also good for you.
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