Protest Pizza + Bar

Protest Pizza + Too Good To Go: saving slices, cutting waste, and maybe making a few new pizza friends along the way.

We were scrolling Instagram the other night when an ad for Too Good To Go popped up. Cool. We know Too Good To Go.

Then we looked a little closer.

WAIT. IS THAT PROTEST PIZZA?! Yep.

There we were. Right on the map. Right in the ad. Our little queer pizza shop on 17th Street apparently out there living its best sponsored-content life.

And the story gets even more DC.

The guy in the video is a friend of our bartender Nick. He came into Protest a few weeks ago to pick up a Too Good To Go Surprise Bag. We met, chatted, and later exchanged DMs after he posted his haul on Instagram. Then, a few weeks later, there he is talking about Too Good To Go. And there we are.

Small town, this city.

But the ad also reminded us that we haven’t really talked much about why Protest Pizza uses Too Good To Go in the first place. So here goes.

WASTING FOOD SUCKS

Pizza shops have a weird little math problem.

We want you to walk into Protest and actually have choices.
Cheese. Pepperoni. Vegan. Something spicy. Something weird. Maybe March on Mushrooms is calling your name.

What we don’t want is for you to walk in toward the end of the night and stare at two lonely slices under the lights because we were so terrified of waste that we stopped making food. But we also don’t have a crystal ball.

Some nights 17th Street is packed. Some nights everyone apparently decides to stay home and watch television. And sometimes that means we end the night with perfectly good pizza that didn’t sell.

The old restaurant answer? Throw it away. We hate that answer.

ENTER: THE SURPRISE BAG

Too Good To Go lets businesses sell surplus food at the end of the day through discounted “Surprise Bags.” The customer doesn’t choose exactly what goes inside. That’s the deal. You might get pepperoni. You might get vegan.

You might discover a pizza you never would have ordered. A little culinary chaos never hurt anybody. From our side, it means food that is still perfectly good gets eaten instead of tossed. And apparently you all have been eating a LOT of it.

Our Too Good To Go dashboard recently showed 1,087 meals saved in just 90 days. That number stopped us for a second, because Protest Pizza is still a very small business. We’re one shop. One kitchen. One little corner of Dupont. And more than a thousand meals that could have become food waste found somebody to eat them instead. That feels pretty damn good.

THIS ISN’T JUST ABOUT FEELING GOOD
Here’s the part small businesses don’t always talk about publicly:
Food waste costs money. Every pizza we make includes ingredients, labor, refrigeration, electricity, oven time and somebody on our team actually making the damn thing. When food goes into the trash, all of that investment goes with it. Too Good To Go lets us recover some of that cost. Not all of it.
And a Surprise Bag certainly isn’t as valuable to us as selling those slices at full price, but that isn’t really the comparison. The comparison is: some revenue + somebody gets fed versus $0 + pizza in a trash can. We’ll take Door Number One.

AND IT LETS US KEEP THE COUNTER LOOKING LIKE A PIZZA SHOP

This part matters too. Reducing waste by simply making less food sounds great until you walk into a slice shop and everything you want is sold out.
We want Protest to have selection. We want you to see pizzas in the case and think: oh damn, which one do I want? Not: I guess cheese is left.

Too Good To Go gives us a little more breathing room. We can offer variety, get smarter about how much we produce, and have another responsible option when we don’t perfectly predict demand. That’s better for you. Better for us. And definitely better than the dumpster.

APPARENTLY WE’RE “LOCAL HEROES” NOW

We also discovered that Too Good To Go has labeled Protest Pizza a Local Hero. We will be adding this to our résumé immediately!

The app also shows us maintaining strong customer ratings with almost no
cancellations or refunds. Which tells us something important: People aren’t just buying the bags because they’re cheap, they’re enjoying them. And some of those people are meeting Protest Pizza for the very first time. That might actually be our favorite part.

MAYBE YOUR $5.99 BAG IS YOUR FIRST PROTEST

We think about this a lot when deciding which platforms and partnerships make sense for Protest. Does this just discount our food? Or does it introduce us to somebody new? Too Good To Go has its own community of people actively looking for restaurants around them. Someone opens the map and they see Protest Pizza. They grab a Surprise Bag, then walk through our doors for the first time. Maybe they come back next week for a slice. Maybe they grab a frozen margarita. Maybe they show up for Drag Bingo. Maybe they bring three friends. Maybe they learn why there’s a pizza shop on 17th Street called Protest in the first place. That’s a pretty great introduction. And frankly, if somebody discovers a queer-owned neighborhood business because
they started out trying to save dinner from the trash? We’re into it.

WASTE LESS. EAT MORE PIZZA.

We’re never going to eliminate food waste completely. Restaurants have unpredictable nights. People order weird things. Weather changes. Events happen. Dupont does Dupont things. But we can be smarter about what happens to the food we don’t sell. Make better forecasts. Adjust production.
Feed our team. Donate when appropriate. And use programs like Too Good To Go to give perfectly good food one more shot at finding a home because pizza took work to make. Someone should eat it. Preferably you!

So if you see Protest Pizza pop up in your Too Good To Go app, grab a Surprise Bag and come say hi. You never know what you’re getting. That’s kind of the point.

Save pizza. Fight waste. Join the Protest.

Pride in Every Slice.

Protest Pizza is located in Washington, DC in the Dupont neighborhood.