Ryan Novak
The Chocolate Pizza Company
Tell us about how you started at The Chocolate Pizza Company and what inspired you to take over the business.
When I started, Chocolate Pizza was a small chocolate shop in my hometown of Marcellus. The owner, Bonnie, and her three friends created the business – they sold gift baskets and different chocolate items. They poured chocolate into a pan and it looked like a pizza so that’s where they got the idea of chocolate pizza. I grew up right across the street and since I was five or six, I’ve been eating those chocolate pizzas. When I was 15 I got a job there washing dishes and cleaning the floors. I ended up going to Syracuse University for entrepreneurship, I went to the Whitman School of Management. I told Bonnie that when she was ready to retire, I’d love to take over the business. In my senior year, she was ready to retire, and I bought the business from her. I did that final year of school to finish my degree while trying to run a chocolate company as a 21-year-old kid.
How do you make your namesake, chocolate pizza?
When it started, we were just making chocolate out of pans, just melting chocolate with tempering machines. Now we’ve grown into a 15,000 square foot facility. We’ve got about 12 full-time people working for us, and we’re doing hundreds of thousands of pounds of chocolate a year now. So we’ve got some great machines and some great people who help make our chocolate pizzas. We do a peanut butter wing, which is a potato chip with peanut butter dipped in chocolate. It’s one of our best-selling items. It’s actually starting to outsell our chocolate pizzas now. Our pizza and wings concept is what keeps our brand going.
The Chocolate Pizza Company was featured on the Food Network. What was that experience like?
That was incredible. The Food Network approached us. They were looking and had narrowed it down to about 10 businesses in upstate New York that they wanted to feature and they were going to pick one of them. We just gave them a pitch and said, “Here’s what chocolate pizza is and we think we’d be perfect for the show Unwrapped.” And we won. They chose us out of all the other people. They came in and filmed for two days. It was just incredible. Just being able to say we’re on The Food Network is just as incredible. It’s good advertising. It just gives us some good legitimacy. And from there they came back and they filmed another episode of Food Factory. When we moved into our new facility, they came and filmed a new episode again. And it’s just such a cool process working with these people who have the whole production capabilities. They have all these different neat cameras, and it’s just really cool to showcase an upstate New York business on a national scale on The Food Network.
You have a very strong following on social media. What is your strategy for engaging customers online?
We’re just us. People love to see behind the scenes. They love to see our story. They like to interact with us and get to know us as people, not just chocolate people. It’s fun to show them what it’s like to run a small business and what we do on a daily basis. It’s not all glory and fun – there’s a lot of hard work and late nights. I think it translates into our social media where people can see what we do to make a successful chocolate company. And we have a very photogenic product, which is fantastic.
You sell your products at other retailers like Wegmans and Stewart’s Shops. How do you initiate and sustain those relationships successfully?
We reached out to Wegmans and said, “We’re an upstate New York company just like you. Let’s put our products in your stores and see how the customer base reacts to it.” And people love it. They love being able to buy our products in a bunch of different Wegmans stores, and Stewart’s is the same. They opened a branch in Marcellus and we just approached them and the partnership just grows. It translates well and we really tie in the upstate New York roots of it all.
What makes chocolate such a good gift?
It’s an affordable luxury. Whether things are up or down, there is always going to be a birthday to celebrate. You also have a reason to say thank you or show your appreciation. It’s a fun thing that you can taste, you can enjoy, and you can remember. And chocolate pizza is memorable because many people haven’t seen it before.
If you could only eat one of your products for the rest of time, what would you choose and why?
Peanut butter wings, no question. I eat them every day as it is. It’s just a potato chip with peanut butter dipped in chocolate, but it’s hands down, our best product. There’s barely a day that goes by that I don’t eat one or two of the peanut butter wings.
What is something your customers might not know about you or your business?
It takes a lot of work. From September through Easter, we’re pretty much here making chocolate seven days a week. It’s a seasonal business so we have to be prepared for the holidays. We have to put in the hours now so we can be ready for the demand that comes in November and December. It takes a lot of great people and a lot of long hours behind the scenes to make this work.
And we ship all over the country, so just go to our website and order online.
What is special about Central New York?
I just love the seasons. Being in Central New York, there’s nothing like it. I wouldn’t change it for anything. We’re coming into fall, which is my favorite season. It’s a great place to live – great people, great communities, just great people. I just really love upstate New York.
September 2025
