South Norwood Domino’s celebrates 25 years

South Norwood Domino’s Pizza owner Andy Polvay didn’t start out wanting to be a Domino’s Franchisee. He started out working part-time while studying culinary arts at Johnson & Wales in Providence, on the East Side.

He was not successful immediately. His first job was delivering pizzas, and he said he wanted to branch out from that.

“I started delivering pizzas, and didn’t really love it,” he said. “So I started working inside, they taught me how to make pizzas, and that didn’t work out well either. But I said, ‘No no no, I want to work on the craft.’”

This was Polvay’s entry point into pizza. He said Domino’s doesn’t really work like most franchise businesses. First of all, most of the time you can’t just buy a franchise. Polvay said you have to work as at least a manager for a full year before they’ll let you buy into the business.

“Domnio’s has what’s called, ‘Grow Within,’” he said. “Unless you managed a store for a year or supervised for 18 months, because they want people who know the business. They’ve always been like that. They tried at one time to take outside people, and that really didn’t work because they thought it was a way to make quick money. One of them was the grandson of the Dunkin’ founder, and he failed miserably, because he thought all he had to do was go to the bank. There’s a lot more to it.”

“We get fresh dough delivered three times a week, so it’s different every time it comes in; we’re not using frozen product, so you have to deliver a skill and art to making pizza,” he said.

Polvay said they take the dough very seriously. Dough will react and cook differently based on its environments, so depending on the season, they’ll get dough with different characteristics.

“We have a bunch of commissaries that only service Domino’s stores, and so we order, the next day we get it, the dough is labeled and constantly proving,” he said. “They have a summer formula and a winter formula, so they put less yeast in the summer because stores are more warm and humid in the summer. They use a different formula in Colorado, for instance, because of the high altitude, which makes a difference also.”

Polvay said when he first started, the menu was much different.

“We started with two sizes of pizza and Coke,” he said. “So in 1983, I started working for a couple of small franchisees. I wanted to start a franchise in Massachusetts, and coming from New York, Providence, Rhode Island was only a couple of streets away.”

Polvay said he went first to the highest volume Domino’s in the northeast, which at the time was in Medford.

“They wanted to be simple; ‘no Diet Coke, that would confuse the driver,’ they thought,” he said with a laugh. “It’s a white can versus a red can, how hard could it be?”

Polvay said he started in the 90s with his first store in Dedham, Massachusetts behind the Dedham Mall. He then built the ones in Needham and Norwood about a decade later.

In Needham, he said, because they didn’t have global positioning system (GPS) satellites available, they hired a retired firefighter to map out their routes. He said the system they used was pins on a map.

“We had a big map on the wall and the driver would come in and we’d tell them, ‘Okay you’re the red dots tonight,’” he said. “When I opened Needham, we knew we would be busy, and nobody knew the delivery area, so I hired a firefighter who would come in on Friday and Saturday nights from 4 p.m. to 10 p.m. just routing off drivers. He was totally into it and we were totally into having him there.”

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While he said he enjoyed those stores, the Norwood store is kind of unique.

“It’s really diverse,” he said. “The people who live here are Indian, Portuguese, Asian, white, people who’ve been here forever and people who just moved here,” he said. “When I opened the store in Needham, you had ‘upper class’ people. So for a three-day holiday weekend, everybody was gone. It was very difficult to hire people.”

Polvay said the one thing he learned from Norwood was to get involved in the community. Readers may remember last year he donated $25,000 to the Town Snow and Ice Fund, but he said there was so much more, and he said that investment in Norwood has paid off dividends.

“We’re very involved in the Town, whether its helping with fundraising through our fundraising cards or the discounts we give to the people who run the Town,” he said. “So the fire department, the police department, the Department of Public Works, Norwood Light, the teachers, we give them a carryout discount. We work with the little league, the football team, the basketball team, and more. We donate pizzas for National Night Out with the Norwood Police, we donate pizzas for the Public Safety Open House in the fall – though not last year because they were replacing the floor there – but we’re there this year. I think generally, if people want stuff, we try to say yes, as long as it’s within reason. We sell pizzas to school programs at a discount, so if they want to fundraise by selling them at a profit or they want some for the chess club, or football team we do that.”

Polvay said personally, Norwood has been a great place for him.

“I love doing business in this Town,” he said. “I like doing what I do, and so it helps me engage with those people and want to do it more. I think after 40 years of being in Domino’s, I’m not bored of it yet.”

Polvay’s Norwood location will be offering take-out customers a medium pizza for a quarter – that’s 25 cents – with the purchase of a large until the end of June.