Shelters get thousands of pies from ‘Pizza Across America’

(NewsNation Now) — Two nonprofits came together this week to bring thousands of pizzas to people in need across the country.

Scott Wiener, who founded Slice Out Hunger in New York City, and Carmine Testa, of World Pizza Champions and owner of Carmine’s Pizza Factory in New Jersey, teamed up to form the campaign “Pizza Across America,” which helped pizzerias around America to deliver pies to shelters and soup kitchens.

Restaurants could sign up online to make the deliveries from Feb. 7 through 11.

By signing up, the pizzerias pledged to either donate 30 pizzas or raise $300 for a local hunger relief charity.

Pizza fans, too, can help the cause, even if they don’t have their own restaurant, by supporting local businesses, Wiener said.

It all started when Wiener invited Testa to Manhattan in 2017 and told him to bring pizzas to feed people who needed food.

“I loved the feeling,” Testa said, and on the drive home, he thought, “We should do this for everybody.”

So, Testa asked Wiener how to get pizzas to people on a larger scale.

“Scott said give me a couple minutes to work on it, and he was able to come up with the idea of how to coordinate all these pizzerias across the country to do this,” Wiener said.

Wiener said this year alone, hundreds of thousands of people will be fed by the campaign.

“I think our total number of pizzas is somewhere in the 40,000 range,” Wiener said. “Hundreds of pizzerias are involved in this across the country.”