Before It Hits Your Table: The Story Behind a Spinato's Pizza

From Arizona wheat fields to our Family Kitchen in Tempe, your pizza has quite the story before you take the first bite.

When a pizza lands on your table at Spinato's, you're probably not thinking about wheat fields, tomato harvests, or the people who made the dough that morning.

But we are. 🍕

For more than 50 years, our Chicago tavern-style thin crust and signature sweet sauce have been at the heart of Spinato's. And while the recipes are important, making the pizza you know and love starts long before someone stretches the dough and adds your favorite toppings.

It starts with the ingredients.

Our pizza dough begins right here in Arizona, where Hayden Flour Mills works with local farmers to grow heritage grains. The wheat is stone milled in Arizona before making its way to our Spinato's Family Kitchen in Tempe.

Our sauce takes a different route. Stanislaus tomatoes are grown in Modesto, California and harvested during a short 75-day season when they've reached peak ripeness and sweetness. Within six hours of being picked, they're sorted, packed, and sealed into cans to preserve that fresh flavor.

That natural sweetness is part of what makes our signature sweet sauce taste the way it does. The other part is tradition. Sweet pizza sauce has roots in South Chicago, where our founder, Ken Spinato, grew up before bringing his family's pizza traditions to Arizona more than 50 years ago.

Eventually, those two journeys meet in Tempe.

This is where our Family Kitchen comes in.

Every day, a team of about 13 people makes many of the recipes that eventually end up in our restaurants.

Russell makes our pizza dough fresh from scratch, mixing, cutting, and weighing it before it's ready to head out. Jerry makes our signature pizza sauce. Olga makes our desserts. Marcus makes our marinara, vodka cream, and other recipes.

Having one dedicated team make these recipes is one of the ways we keep the Spinato's pizza you order at one restaurant consistent with the pizza you know from another.

Instead of asking every restaurant to make its own version of our dough, sauces, and other proprietary recipes, our Family Kitchen team makes them from the same recipes, day after day.

Then it's time for another trip.

Every other day, the Spinato's Family Kitchen truck loads up and heads across the Valley, delivering fresh dough, sauce, and other ingredients to our restaurants. So, if you happen to spot our truck while you're out and about, now you know what's going on inside. 👀🍕

From there, our restaurant teams take over. The dough is stretched. The sauce is spread. Your toppings go on. The pizza hits the oven.

And finally, after Arizona wheat fields, a California tomato harvest, our Family Kitchen in Tempe, a truck ride across the Valley, and a whole lot of people doing their part...

your pizza hits the table.

That's why we care so much about what happens before that moment.

Great pizza isn't made with one big decision. It's built through hundreds of little ones. Choosing ingredients we're proud to serve. Working with people who care about their craft. Making our recipes from scratch. And creating systems that help us serve the food our guests know and love consistently across our restaurants.

By the time your pizza reaches you, we want all of that work to become pretty invisible.

Because you shouldn't have to think about any of it.

You just have to decide who gets the first slice. ❤️🍕