It’s your perfect Friday night takeaway: pizza and a pooch.
If you order a big ol’ pizza pie from Just Pizza & Wing Co. store in Amherst, New York, you’ll be greeted with something even better than just the delicious aroma of pepperoni.
Doubling up as a philanthropist as well as a purveyor of delicious food, the pizzeria is attaching flyers of adoptable dogs to its cardboard delivery boxes – helping pups find their forever homes, one pizza at a time.
The idea came after Mary Alloy, the owner of the franchise along with three of her children, began volunteering with the Niagara Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA). Working alongside Kimberly LaRussa, an SPCA event coordinator, they sought to find new ways to help their local dogs.
Alloy told CNN:
Kimberly texted me one night and was like: ‘Hey, what would you think about putting pictures of the dogs on pizza boxes?’ and I just couldn’t wait. We are all animal lovers here, so I got permission from the franchise to do it and immediately got to work.
Last Friday, February 28, the pizzeria rolled out an ingenious idea: attaching snaps of dogs looking to be adopted to its pizza boxes. If someone actually adopts a dog featured on a flyer, they will also receive a $50 gift certificate for Just Pizza & Wing Co.
Unsurprisingly, customers are ‘absolutely loving it’, having already gone through 500 boxes since the launch, and after one day of the new initiative a six-month-old puppy named Larry found a new home.
LaRussa said:
We’ve had a tremendous amount of interest and support from the community and beyond since the story went viral on Friday. Many people want to order a pizza just to get the shelter dog photo, other pizzerias have offered to put flyers on their pizza boxes, and so many people are tagging their friends and family.
However, Alloy isn’t stopping with pizzas. She’s actively involved with hospice care, non-profit medical organisations, autism centers, children’s hospitals, and animal shelters throughout Buffalo. ‘I try to do whatever I can for other organisations who need help. We have donation boxes all over the store. Anything I can do to the help the community, I’m going to do it,’ she added.
Alloy had always wanted to volunteer for the SPCA, but couldn’t due to her business commitments – however, she still tries to help out by bringing food to the charity’s events. ‘That’s just the kind of person she is. We are so grateful to Mary and Just Pizza,’ LaRussa said.
Other pizza restaurants, such as Papa Louie’s Italian Kitchen & Motocross Cafe in Ohio, are following suit, and have credited Alloy for the idea.
Her pizzeria will continue the initiative ‘for as long as it takes’ to get all the dogs a new home, but it won’t just be dogs – LaRussa said flyers of adoptable cats will be rolled out with pizza purchases in the near future.
Earlier this year, a woman in Minnesota was reunited with her dog after it went missing and was found in Florida after its image printed on a Motorworks Brewing beer can did the rounds on social media.
You can never underestimate the good that can be done with pizza and beer.
If you have a story you want to tell, send it to UNILAD via story@unilad.com
After graduating from Glasgow Caledonian University with an NCTJ and BCTJ-accredited Multimedia Journalism degree, Cameron ventured into the world of print journalism at The National, while also working as a freelance film journalist on the side, becoming an accredited Rotten Tomatoes critic in the process. He’s now left his Scottish homelands and took up residence at UNILAD as a journalist.