Giving Out Pizza From a Second Story Apartment Raises Over $30,000

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Visit roku.com today and score the 4K TV you've been waiting for. When the COVID pandemic swept this country, he got an idea to start making pizza and drop them out of his apartment window. This led to his nonprofit called Good Pizza that has raised over $30,000. Ben grew up in Portland, Maine with his parents and two younger brothers. Starting from a young age, Ben was getting involved in his community.

Here is Ben's story. When I was in middle school, I was on a school board subcommittee for wellness in the town. And one of the jobs that we were tasked with was renovating the cafeteria.

And so I actually spent the freshman year of high school touring local cafeterias to try to understand how we could improve our operations and food service. And as part of that program, the administration let me earmark $2,500 for a program that I had come up with called the Chef of the Month program. And my idea was that we would ask local chefs to take over our cafeteria for the day once a month, and they would serve their food at school lunch prices.

And it worked. So we would have, you know, a nice hotel from Portland come in and the chef would do paella for the whole school and serve it for $2.75. There was a local pasta company that came in every year to do the service. And the owner came in one day and his manager called out and he asked me if I knew how to cook and if I could help him on the line. And I grew up cooking with my mom and really enjoyed that. So I sort of felt confident enough to jump on the line with him and just serve pasta for the day.

And at the end, he said that was really great. If you need a job this summer, you should call me and that ended up being my first summer job was restocking the shelves and then grilling pita and then making meals in this little pasta prepared goods shop in South Portland, Maine. I went to college in Boston, and went to Tufts University and found myself fairly heavily involved in nonprofit work. So there were a whole bunch of opportunities that I had started to get involved with to sort of give back to the community. At the same time, I was starting my first company. And when I was 18, I opened a food truck company with one of my best friends from home called Mainly Burgers. And we grew that company together for three years and grew it to three trucks and 16 employees and it was a really great experience to start to understand how a business operates and how it grows.

It was getting me back in the kitchen. And I really loved the opportunity but when I was coming towards the end of my college experience, I didn't feel like I was ready to make that my full time career. And so I took a more traditional route and went into management consulting. For a few years after school.

That job landed me at business school. And when the pandemic started I had been cooking more, and I started to make pizza. And then I started dropping them on my window. And then I started asking people to donate. And now I guess I run a little pizza nonprofit out of my second story center city Philadelphia apartment, and we've raised $32,000 so far and donated all to hunger relief and homelessness in the city of Philadelphia. I grew up with this amazing supportive family, and didn't have to worry about so many things that other people had to worry about. And it felt natural to use that platform to give back. One of the other things that motivated me was. So I think about it in two parts. The first is when I started making pizza.

And the second is when it becomes this thing where it's raising money and it's dropped out a window, etc. On the pizza front before school when I was working as a consultant I was traveling a ton was doing usually about 140 nights in a hotel per year. One of the things I missed when I was traveling that much was cooking for myself, and for friends. As I said I grew up cooking with my mom and that was a really important experience for me generally just recognizing the impact of having people around the table and cooking for people as a display of love in some way, and I wanted to do more of that, and then I had this more traditional kitchen experience from my first job from the food trucks, and I really just enjoyed cooking it's something that relaxes me, it's something that I look forward to, and coming to school and not having to travel all the time, I was looking forward to getting back into that. So I do remember when I first made pizza in my apartment, because I had been researching it for a little while and I had taken a leap and bought some equipment. It was just a food that I liked, and it's a fun analytical exercise to some degree as well because there are all these different variables of pizza that you can play with and I was excited about that.

There is the hydration level in the dough which is how much water you're using and there's the fermentation time which is how long you're letting it go and what temperature you're cooking at what you're cooking it on and the combination of sauce and cheese and all these things all these variables that were interesting to me. So I remember making that for the first time, and being totally infatuated by the dough rising and then trying to figure out how to make it into actual dough balls that we can spread into pizza and researching how I wanted to do the sauce and going deep on message boards about my favorite pizza places around the country and people trying to recreate their favorite pizzas, and it was just a fun experience for me. So that's part one is I started making pizza in the summer of 2019 as a way to cook more as this fun project to work on and this fun thing that I wanted to solve for this food that I liked and that was sort of it. Stage two of the story is when the pandemic started, and the honest reason for good pizza at the beginning was, I had made dough for my friends. I, over the year had gotten more comfortable and I was enjoying having pizza parties and sharing that, and that weekend March where the pandemic sort of hit, and we didn't know what it was quite yet but we knew that it was a bad idea to have friends over for dinner party. I had 15 pizzas in my refrigerator that I was planning to make for friends. Instead of having them over I bought 40 feet of string on Amazon and told them that if they came by my apartment around dinner time I would lower them pizza outside my window.

And it was nothing at the time, other than a chance for me to make my friends smile, give them something to laugh about it just seemed so absurd that I would be lowering this pizza out of my apartment window. And you've been listening to Ben Berman's story. When we come back, Ben Berman's story continues here on Our American Stories. Folks, if you love the great American stories we tell and love America like we do, we're asking you to become a part of the Our American Stories family. If you agree that America is a good and great country please make a donation. A monthly gift of $17.76 is fast becoming a favorite option for supporters. Go to our American stories.com now and go to the donate button and help us keep the great American stories coming.

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Head to Walmart.com today and score the 4K TV you've been waiting for. He's a second year grad student in Philadelphia. When the COVID pandemic started, Ben created a nonprofit called Good Pizza that's raised over $30,000. Ben makes pizza in his home oven and lowers them down from his second story apartment window.

He asks for a non required donation, and his pizzas are completely free. We return to Ben for the rest of the story. So it was never a thought of this becoming anything. It was just this fun thing that you do to make your friends laugh and create some memory.

And there was no plan beyond that. But as I did it over the summer, I started to recognize that there may be a platform here that could grow a little bit. I had started to try to figure out where I wanted to direct my own giving for the year, which is something that I try to do every year. And my girlfriend very smartly pointed out that I was spending a lot of money on pizza ingredients and perhaps this would be an avenue to direct my giving instead, which is obviously a fantastic idea. And so, you know, midway over the summer, my thinking was, well, instead of giving a few hundred dollars to an organization that I care about, what if I spent that money on pizza ingredients instead, ask people for donations, and maybe turn that $200 into $600, or whatever that multiple looks like.

And there weren't a lot of zeros attached to it. It was just me thinking, well, maybe I can both make people smile and raise a few extra dollars for these organizations and wouldn't that be a cool way to spend this time where I have to be home anyway. Slowly people started to hear about it. Friends tell friends and someone walks down the street and sees this pizza being lowered out of a second story apartment. And I had started an Instagram less for the actual business opportunity and more because I wanted a place to document my pizza, but was too embarrassed to post it on my personal Instagram.

The big break was when Barstool Sports came in November. So they have a very popular pizza review series. And I had tagged them in a post, mostly as a joke with friends saying how funny would it be if, you know, they try all the best pizza places in the world, and then they came to my apartment. And they ended up reaching out and said, hey, are you open on Saturday? And I didn't really know what to say since it's just my apartment. I'm never really open nor am I ever really closed.

So I said, Sure, I'm definitely open on Saturday, and I would love to have you come by. And they did. So I made them pizza and the review went online the next week. And I think it came out well. But that was sort of the first chance for, you know, widespread visibility into what I was working on. And very quickly, literally overnight, it went from a few hundred followers to 10,000 followers and all this money started to come in from people that just wanted to support what you were doing.

And it just has sort of been a whirlwind that's been a total blast and definitely never something that I expected. I think the most I've ever made is 25. But a normal pizza drop is 20 pizzas, which I still think is quite a bit for a home oven. I can only make two at a time because I'm literally cooking in my home electric oven. So I make two pizzas every 15 minutes. So the way it works is I do weekly usually on Sunday night pizza drops with 20 pizzas. As the following has grown over the last few months, I've moved to a lottery system for people to get a pizza. So pizza is always, always free. There's absolutely no necessity to donate in order to get a pizza.

You do not have to donate to enter the lottery. The pizza is just to make people smile and hopefully people like what we're doing and feel inclined to donate either to us or directly to the organizations. I give every single penny that comes in a way. So all the money that goes into the pizza ingredients, the sauce, the cheese, the dough, all of that, that money comes out of my own pocket.

And then we donate 100 percent of the proceeds that people donate. I open up a lottery by posting on my Instagram two days before the pizza drops. So usually on Friday afternoon, if I'm baking that weekend, you can find a link to a lottery on Instagram.

And then 24 hours later, after the lottery opens, I close the lottery. We randomly select 20 people using Microsoft Excel and I email those 20 people a form to select their pickup time and they get to come by the next night to actually get their pizza. So it's sort of this whole three day process for me, for every pizza drop, where on the first day I make dough, on the second day the lottery opens and I start to make sauce. Then the third day you get all your ingredients together. And then actually on the fourth day you actually make the pizza. I have to fold all the pizza boxes. I write little notes to everyone on all the pizza boxes.

So it ends up being this sort of lengthy four day process, but it allows me to make an actual product. The pizza that I'm really proud of. I think the dough that I make is good. I think the sauce that I make is good, etc.

And it is the spacing out so that people can have a chance to enter the lottery and select a pickup time and all the backend logistics that go into it. And this has been an unexpected but really fulfilling way to spend my free time. There are definitely days where I am tired and don't want to make pizza dough and don't want to fold pizza boxes and wish that I did not have Instagram followers that were expecting pizza.

There are days where I wish I didn't have to post on Instagram because I don't know what I'm doing and I'm trying to figure out all of that. But I feel like we're working on a good thing. I feel like I'm making some at least small impact. And the support that people have lent, the smiles that I think I've been able to bring to people who have tried the pizza or even just seen what I'm working on on Instagram or in different press clippings. And most importantly, the dollars that I've been able to donate to organizations that I really do think are making an impact in people's lives. I don't really think I'm making an impact directly in people's lives.

I think pizza is delicious. I don't think I'm changing the world. I do think that the organizations that I'm able to support are making a massive, massive impact in people's lives. And so if I can play a small role by carving out some time to make pizza dough in order to support that, that's a no brainer for me that I'm going to continue doing as long as people are willing to support it.

One of the things that I have been most excited by throughout this whole process has been the support from the community. I did not expect there to be so much support from everyday people who saw this online and wanted to support from local restaurants who have reached out to offer me kitchen space to make more pizza. From folks around the world who have donated to us and said, I'm not ever going to be able to try your pizza, but I love what you're doing and want to support you.

Here's $25. That's incredible to me. There also have been fun opportunities to engage with larger brands that for me have been crazy and fun. So I mentioned Barstool Sports who was here to do a pizza review and that gave a lot of gave us a lot of Instagram followers and a big platform to raise money on the Philadelphia 76ers came over. So Matisse Deibel and Tobias Harris from the 76ers came to my apartment and tried pizza and donated $5,000 of their own money to the organizations that we're supporting.

Yeah, there have been big brands, but what I've been most energized by is just the everyday people who want to support in some way and who are commenting on Instagram to say it's wonderful and it made their day and they can't wait to come try a pizza. And I've told people that, you know, when I get asked about long term plans, the plan is just to keep making pizza until I make it for everyone who wants one. I talked about the lottery system for the last few months for the 20 pizzas that I give away weekly.

I usually have over 900 people that sign up for the lottery. So I'm going to just keep making pizza until all of those people get one. This good pizza project is something that I'm proud of because it was in many ways an accident. It was a chance for me to take a hobby that I enjoyed and give back to the community a little bit. And at this point, it feels less like something that I created and more like something that the people around me who have supported it created.

And I just get to be the vehicle to continue to create those files and raise those dollars. And a special thanks to Faith for her work on that piece and also a special thanks to Ben Berman for his story and by the way, for what he's doing. And it just shows, well, it shows the good heart and the soul of this country. You can visit Ben's Instagram account at Good Pizza P.H.L. That's Good Pizza P.H.L.

Ben Berman's Philadelphia pizza story here on Our American Stories. Free agency and more relive the biggest plays from the season with fully condensed game replays. Plus, stay connected with 24 seven football news and coverage on NFL Network. Sign up today at plus dot NFL dot com terms and conditions apply from football playoffs to basketball madness. TCL Roku TVs are the best way to stream your favorite live sports with all the biggest sports channels, a sports zone with all available games in one place and apps like I heart radio sports podcasts such as The Herd with Colin Cowherd. Cheering on your favorite team has never been easier. A big screen TCL Roku TV offers premium picture and sound quality.

So you'll feel like you're right in the action. Find the perfect TCL Roku TV for you today at go dot TCL dot com slash TCL Roku TV. Are you looking to step up to a 4K smart TV, one that gives you unparalleled clarity and picture resolution? Then we've got good news for you because the Vizio sixty five inch V series 4K smart TV is now just 348. With all your favorite apps built in, you can stream straight out of the box.

You can even sing along to all your favorite music and radio on the I heart radio app. Looking for a smaller or bigger screen? Vizio offers unbeatable prices on all these series 4K smart TVs. Head to Walmart dot com today and score the 4K TV you've been waiting for.