PHILADELPHIA — While stuck in his second-floor Center City apartment during the height of the pandemic in 2020, graduate student Ben Berman worked on his pizza recipe.
With large gatherings out of the question, the pizzas had to go somewhere. To maintain social-distancing, he rigged up a box with a rope and lowered the pies to the Sansom Street sidewalk, where friends snapped them up on Sunday nights. Berman sent any money he received for his efforts to charities.
“I can either give away $100 to a nonprofit that I care about, or I can spend $100 on pizza ingredients and … give away $500,” through his earnings, he said.
Good Pizza, as Berman dubbed his grassroots campaign, blew up in late 2020, getting national attention. He set up a lottery to give away the 20 pizzas he’d bake, raising $1,500 at a clip for such organizations as Philabundance and Project HOME. All told, Berman raised $75,000 through May 2021, when, with his Wharton MBA in hand and a new career on the way, he left Philadelphia for New York.
Now, Berman is making his biggest donation yet. He is handing over Good Pizza to Philabundance, the hunger-relief organization. Each week, Philabundance Community Kitchen will offer 20 pizzas to the public via a drawing on GoodPizzaPHL.com.
For the first round of pizzas, 20 winners were to be selected Feb. 28, with the pies ready for pickup or delivery on March 2. Suggested donations start at $20 per pizza — plain, pepperoni or spinach.
The charming rope-and-pulley system is out. Good Pizza’s former delivery method can’t be used, what with Berman now living in Brooklyn and about to help launch a national food-related business.
Philabundance’s transportation fleet will deliver the pizzas within the city between 5 and 7 p.m. Wednesdays. Anyone not in Philadelphia may pick up pizzas at the Philabundance Community Kitchen, 2224 N. 10th St., between 5 and 6 p.m. Wednesdays.
Standing on Sansom Street in January 2021, Philabundance chief executive Loree D. Jones and Project HOME founder Sister Mary Scullion picked up their own pizzas and met Bermann.
The pizza-making will fit in seamlessly with other Philabundance work, including preparing meals, Jones said. (Philabundance offers a 16-week training course to prepare students for work in the food-service industry.) The community kitchen’s students will make the pizzas in its massive facility in North Philadelphia.
Unlike Berman, who bought his ingredients at Whole Foods, Philabundance has leveraged its nonprofit status to obtain donations from such companies as Hormel (500 pounds of pepperoni), King Arthur (flour for a year plus a $20,000 donation), Cabot (mozzarella cheese), and Lloyd pans.
Jones said the program could be expanded. “This is just a pilot,” she said. “We have to see if there’s an appetite for it.”
