Business: Rolling in Dough

WHEN DAN DIZIO got his start in the soft pretzel business, he was selling his wares from a plastic crate on the corner of Southampton and the Boulevard in the Northeast. His pretzels were five for a dollar, and he could sell 1,000 in a day. After splitting the take with his supplier, he’d bike home with $100 in his pocket. He was 11.

That was the way the Philadelphia pretzel world worked in 1983. The mom-and-pop bakeries that had provided pretzels to the city’s vendors since the 1920s had long ago given way to wholesale factories that lined State Street and dotted South Philly, baking all night to make early-morning deliveries to corner stores and street carts. Dan sold the leftovers from the bakers at Kensington Soft Pretzel. The owner’s son made extra dough by employing Northeast kids to hawk the twists on corners from Sesame Place to Harbison Avenue.

Twenty-five years later, Dan is still selling pretzels, from a storefront on Frankford near Cottman Avenue. They’re still a bargain — four for a dollar — but now he sells as many as 40,000 in a day. Last year his little store, the flagship of what is now his Philly Pretzel Factory empire, grossed $1.7 million.

AT 7:30 A.M. ON a chilly Friday morning, nine people are mixing, twisting, baking and bagging pretzels at the Factory in Mayfair. A steady line of almost-awake customers, most clutching car keys in one hand and exact change in the other, snatch up the pretzels as quickly as they appear, hot out of the oven every eight minutes, ordering curtly by price: “Gimme $5.” Five dollars gets you 22 pretzels, in a large brown-paper bag embossed with Philly Pretzel Factory’s round green logo. Order 50 or 100 to treat your co-workers, or to sell as a fund-raiser for your kid’s soccer team — “Gimme $11” or “Gimme $20” — and you get a hefty box of twists. Order just one, and the cashier dispenses with the packaging, handing you a hot pretzel with a wax-paper tissue. You’ll eat it before you get out the door, even if it is before 8 in the morning. Over the course of the day, the Factory sells a staggering 17 pretzels per customer on average. At this hour, the most popular deal is a true Philly breakfast: four pretzels and a 20-ounce Coke for $2. “We need more dough!” a manager hollers every 15 minutes.

That’s how the Philly pretzel world works in 2008. Many of the wholesale bakeries are gone, bought up or done in by rising real estate prices. In their place are the new mom-and-pops: franchises. Franchising a fresh-baked city tradition on a large scale might seem a risky move in a city with strong loyalties — after all, there’s only one Pat’s, only one Geno’s — but hey, it worked for Rita’s and water ice. And the men behind what is now the region’s most prolific franchise already knew that a franchise model built on the Philly soft pretzel could succeed in Philadelphia. Like Dan, Vince Marinelli of A Taste of Philly (21 locations) and Jim Moore of Jim’s Pretzels (17 locations) had already been franchisees of sorts — they, too, sold pretzels on street corners as kids in the ’80s.

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