Hi, Mary Lenihan here, and I’m today with Josh and Sarah Koopman at Pizza Shark. They’re owners along with Todd Montgomery who is busy cooking at their Chatham location.
We’re here today in Harwich, which is their first location.
What I love is when you order something, you have these great pictures online. And that’s what they look like.
Yeah.
Well, that’s honestly our biggest thing is … No it’s quality control … it’s consistency. Like we’re really big … like if you get the same pizza every week, we want it to look exactly the same, taste the same.
We prep most of our toppings ourselves, which is kind of unheard. Most pizza places – buy them – yeah, buy them. But we make our own meatballs, roast our mushrooms, our green peppers, and all of that. We roast chicken, like it’s a lot of our stuff is fresh.
So, on a busy Friday night, how many pizzas do you estimate you make?
This time of year, we’re probably doing 400 or 500 in Harwich.
Think about that – that’s a lot of dough.
And Denis is giving Harwich a run for its money.
And that’s only been a year.
Yeah, not even, really.
It’s been a really great, strategic location.
Yeah, that one kind of just popped. And actually The Coop was instrumental in that. Because we hadn’t had to borrow money up until that point. We started just with every dollar we had in our savings account. But we did take out a line of credit from The Coop just to secure the Dennis location, which is incredible. And we were able to draw off that as needed and pay back as needed. That’s been huge. We wouldn’t have been able …
Yeah, we go an equity line of credit and we also we used one of your programs to buy the equipment, too. Two of the ovens and walk-in that we had to build. Those are two fair ways we wouldn’t have been able to get into that space.
The newest pizza that we have is the Thresher Shark. All the specialty pizzas we come up with a fun shark name for them. The Thresher is salami, feta, green pepper, pepperoni, garlic and then it comes with a side of Italian dressing and like a stuffed pepper.
So, it’s just like an Italian.
And you do subs and salads.
We do subs, yeah. We do salads and sandwiches.
We do breakfast slices. A lot of people don’t know about that. It’s a sneaky – get a side of maple syrup if you order the Sand Shark.
So, like in summer especially, I see the really shrewd customers will get like three large pizzas and then a small Sand Shark with like prosciutto and other cool stuff on it. And I’m like they’re going
to eat that the next morning.
It’s like a breakfast sandwich just on a pizza.
We at The Coop, like you’re a poster child for small business that’s our sweet spot. And we’re grateful for your continued business, and hopefully we keep up as you grow, we grow with you. Offer you more of what you guys need.
We’re thankful for you guys. We’re like regulars in the Harwich and Dennis branches. Every single person in there knows our names and asks how was last night. I’m like uh! It’s like you know.
My first checkbook was at the West Barnstable branch. I was at Yarmouth Port forever.
That’s one of our oldest branches.
But yeah, I was there when I was 13.
But then we like did our personal mortgage through you guys, like we you know.
Yeah, and you’re looking to something else like that. That’s good.
Well, we thank you for time and I think this is going to be perfect.
Thank you for coming by.
Thank you.
All right.
Great.