By Mike Finney

DOVER — Grotto Pizza hopes to be rolling in the dough when it comes to its new full-scale production facility that the Delaware pizza chain opened at 122 Rosemary Road in southeast Dover last Tuesday.

The new Grotto production site is aiming to make more than two million pounds of dough annually for all 23 Grotto Pizza restaurants in Delaware, Maryland and Pennsylvania.

The 9,800-square-foot production facility, which will centralize dough production and handle dry storage and food distribution for the restaurants, has about 20 employees.

“We’re excited about the efficient hub-and-spoke capabilities at our new production facility and feel it’s the next logical step in our expansion efforts throughout Delaware and beyond,” said Jeff Gosnear, vice president of Grotto Pizza. “Dover is the ideal ‘hub’ due to its centralized location in the Mid-Atlantic region — permitting us to better serve our existing stores while concurrently opening up the door for new stores in the region.”

The new centralized Dover production facility is just the latest venture in Grotto Pizza’s six-decade-old history under Dominick Pulieri, owner and founder of the franchise.

“Our journey originated from humble beginnings in 1960 in a pizza kitchen on Rehoboth Avenue, to now operating 23 locations in three states with over 1,800 employees during peak season,” Mr. Pulieri said. “The new production facility in Dover allows us to broaden the Grotto Pizza footprint in the area while strengthening our ability to create high-quality, consistent dough for our legendary pizza.”

Grotto Pizza announced its intentions to create the Dover production facility back in October 2019. About a year-and-a-half and a global pandemic later, it is up and running.

Back when Mr. Gosnear was speaking before Dover’s Development Advisory Committee in 2019, he said combining Grotto’s previous two dough production facilities into one hub in Dover just made sense to the company, considering its size and various locations throughout the state.

“What we’re doing is we are moving our commissary,” Mr. Gosnear said, a year-and-a-half ago. “We have two commissaries right now. We have one in the southern part of the state in Lewes and we have one in New Castle. We are combining it into one large commissary in Dover in an industrial park.

“We make our dough now in two places — not at the stores — we take the dough fresh to the stores about five times a week and some actually six times a week. What we’ll be doing now is we’ll just be doing it all from one central place and distributing it out from there.”

Grotto Pizza has about 800 year-round employees in its stories, offices and facilities where the pizza dough is mixed. That number swells to 1,300 in the summer when business picks up in the Delaware-beach area.

When it comes to the new production facility in Dover, Mr. Gosnear said, “One thing’s for certain, we’re going to be making a lot of dough.”