Restaurant Business: Toppers Pizza Uses Crowdsourcing to Drive Menu Innovation

For 25 years, Toppers Pizza has been leading the way with innovation in the pizza space. Recently, the brand tapped into their rapid social media following to help create and build buzz around a variation on their famous Topperstix, 3-Cheese Garlicstix. According to an article in Restaurant Business, the brand sourced their more than 140,000 Facebook fans to find out what they wanted, and knew they had to move swiftly.

“When you crowdsource ideas, we learned that it’s important to take action quickly,” Bridget Vetter, Toppers Pizza Manager of Marketing and PR, told Restaurant Business. “We would have disappointed our customers if they felt we didn’t listen to their suggestions.”

Toppers, which has made technology a prime focus of their brand's evolution, made the new item available only by online ordering - which now accounts for 42 percent of the brand's business. Additional effort to create buzz came from putting money behind a social media campaign, and it all added up to a highly successful campaign - one, the brand says, of many more to come.