How does a six-store pizza chain win over high school teams with free dinners?

Champ Pizza is a small chain based in Vancouver, Washington. Its community page makes one promise, with FREE in capitals. Champ Pizza “donates a FREE team dinner every season, every year, to each high school sports team and clubs!” The same page sets short rules for asking.

• Ask at least two weeks before the dinner.
• Send the request by email through the website. Do not call a store.
• Give a name, contact details, the athlete count, and the date and time.
• Pick the food up. Free team dinners are not delivered.
• High-school teams only, not middle school, as Pizza Today reported.

The chain is young. It opened in February 2020, and founder Tyson Cook had never worked in a restaurant. By October 2022, The Columbian reported a sixth store opening in Milwaukie, Oregon. Pizza Today still counted six locations in January 2025. The chain’s own locations page listed four, all in Washington, by November 2025. The team-dinner promise stayed on the site through that change.

The rules came from the phones. “We had to do that because too many people were calling the stores,” Cook told Pizza Today. “This week alone I had six requests for free team dinners.” A phone request lands on a shift manager in the dinner rush. An email lands in one inbox, where one person checks the date, the count and the store.

Two weeks also lets the store plan the bake around its own busy nights. Expect special requests. Cook told Pizza Today that almost every team order asks for gluten-free pizza. Champ’s menu lists a cauliflower crust, so its stores can say yes without a scramble.

Champ Pizza sends enough for two or three slices per person. Team sizes swing widely. Pizza Today described a typical week of requests: “a 25-person cross country team, 150 kids at a marching band camp, and a football team with 100 team members.”

The small dinners are easy. A cross-country team at three slices each eats 75 slices, which is 10 large pizzas. A football team is a catering job. Give it a set bake time and its own oven slot, or split it across two stores. Decide your size limit before the first email arrives.

Champ’s archived menu priced a large build-your-own pizza at $21.99 in December 2025. Ten of them come to $219.90 at menu price. The store does not pay menu price, though. It pays for dough, cheese, sauce, toppings and boxes. A Pizza Today cost lesson works an example where food comes to 30% of sales.

Labor is extra, so schedule the bake for a slow hour. Compare the cost with a field banner, which many schools sell to local businesses. A banner sits on the fence all season. A dinner puts your food in the hands of every player, and the photos land in front of their parents.

Champ Pizza asks the school to name it on social media, for example by posting photos of the team eating. Cook says parents notice. “I often get parents who order from us and say, ‘I saw you donated to my kid’s soccer team,’” he told Pizza Today. “We built a lot of loyalty because of that.”

Those parents are a spending crowd. The Aspen Institute’s Project Play survey found the average US sports family spent $1,016 on a child’s main sport in 2024. That was up 46% since 2019. A free dinner is a small, visible help to a family carrying that bill. It is also a reason to remember which pizzeria helped.

Cook gives pizza freely but does not donate money, Pizza Today reported. His newer program supplies free pizza to concession stands at high-school games. The schools sell slices for $2 to $3. In return, the school hangs a Champ Pizza banner on the field. The money must go to athletics, such as tournament travel or cleats for students who cannot afford them.

Food costs the store less than its menu price, while a cash gift costs its full face value. Food also carries the brand into the stands. Champ’s page adds that it supplies eight local schools and student stores at prices that fit their budgets.

Another pizzeria draws a different line. Dayton’s Original Pizza Factory in Ohio supports schools and events inside its two-mile delivery area. “We look at our primary delivery area as our neighborhood,” owner Bill Daniels told Pizza Today. His point of sale system records each donation, so the cost stays visible.

Demand will not run short. The National Federation of State High School Associations counted 8,266,244 participants in 2024-25. That was up 203,942 from the year before. Every team plays a season, and clubs ask too.

A store near two high schools could hear from many teams each fall. Fall brings football, soccer, volleyball and cross-country. Winter and spring bring their own seasons, and bands and clubs ask too. Champ caps it at one dinner per team per season. Pick your own cap per store per week, and publish it with the rules.

The office is the point of the example. One person owns the inbox, so no request falls through a shift change. Read how franchisees market their location locally for the other local moves that fit beside it.

Most of Champ’s program fits on one web page and one inbox. A group can copy it in a week.

Keep middle-school and youth league requests in a separate lane, if you take them at all. Champ limits free dinners to high-school teams. Its page says it works with younger programs on pricing that fits their budgets.

Champ’s evidence is what parents say at the counter. That is real, but it is anecdote. A franchise group can count more than that, as the guide on telling whether local promotions brought customers explains.

Compare a store’s weeks after a dinner with the same weeks before the program began. Watch the stores near schools that took part. Keep the test simple enough that managers will run it.

A team dinner photo is seen by the families of one team. A short video from a food creator travels to the rest of town. Book it for a game week, when families already eat out after the game. Pair the two in the same season, as the football season guide suggests. CreatoRain, which publishes this analysis, books creators from its food-creator network to film at chain and franchise stores. Its in-house team finds, invites and pays them, then follows up until each video is posted. Each video costs $300, with the creator’s pay included.