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MBA student sells pizza from 2nd-floor dorm to raise funds for charity [Video]

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3 years ago

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Photo Credit: @goodpizzaphl (Instagram)
  • Good Pizza started out as a way to make his friends smile by delivering homemade pizza from his second-story room.
  • After a while, he asked friends to donate cash for the pizza and give it to charity.
  • Good Pizza has already donated more than $30k to feed Philadelphia’s hungry and homeless.

It may have started as a love language from MBA student Ben Berman’s heart but Good Pizza has already donated more than $30K to combat hunger and homelessness in Philadelphia during the pandemic.

Twenty-seven-year-old MBA student Ben Berman said, “Good Pizza was a way for me to give back during a really hard year.”

Berman is not a chef and he developed the passion for cooking at his mother Kerri’s table in Portland, Maine. “My mom, who’s an amazing cook, taught me about food as a love language and a driving force to connect people. I’m never as comfortable as I am with friends around a dinner table,” Berman said.

Berman worked for kitchens at local residents in high school and even launched his food truck business, Mainely Burgers, in 2012. This experience taught him to produce food on a larger scale.

He is now enrolled at an MBA program at the University of Pennsylvania.

Back in March 2020, when he heard the news about impending shutdowns, instead of having a catered dinner party, he decided on making pizzas to give to his friends from his 2nd story apartment.

Berman rigged a pulley system out of 40 feet of thick string and delivered slices of homemade pizza in a brown bag to his friends.

His way of making his friends smile through the homemade pizzas, also lifted his friends’ spirits. This made him experiment on different types of doughs for the crust and toppings. But from being free, he then asked his friends to donate some cash to Venmo for the pizza. Thus, the birth of Good Pizza PHL, which donates 100% of the pizza donations to charities working on feeding the hungry and the homeless.

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Berman said, “It felt like food security and homelessness needed even a bigger boost this year. And these places in Philly were moving the needle— Philabundance, Project Home and Share Food Program.

Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy’s review of Berman’s food in November shot up Good Pizza into Instagram fame.

It has been bombarded with at least 900 requests every week and so Berman had to devise a lottery system for it. Twenty are randomly selected to be eligible for pickup on Sunday nights.

That is why even before the holidays hit, Good Pizza already hit $30,000.  And Berman aims to keep on adding more zeroes to the number and keeping it in his life even after he finishes his MBA in spring. 

Source: TODAY

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