What’s Going on with Tom’s Current Remodeling Project?

If you have been to Tom’s Food Center lately, you may be wondering what’s going on with the construction next to Little Caesars. There seems to be some pretty major remodeling going on between Little Caesars and the deli department. Well your trusty investigative journalist has the scoop for you.

Tuesday December 4th, I sat down with Steve Antaya, one of the owners of Tom’s Food Center in Portland, Okemos, and Tom’s Fuel and Wash also in Portland to ask the question that has been on the minds of our community, “What’s up with the remodeling?”

It seems that Little Caesars is receiving a major technological upgrade to their ordering process and, requiring the extra space. The Little Caesars proprietary Pizza Portal is currently being added to our very own Portland restaurant.

Little Caesars’ Pizza Portal

The Pizza Portal is a new addition to Little Caesars’ new mobile order pick-up program that allows busy customers a fast and easy way to receive their own hot, fresh custom pizza.

“Every second counts when it comes to ordering pick-up,” said David Scrivano, President and CEO of Little Caesars. “This insight inspired our HOT-N-READY model and continues to inspire our entire business. By harnessing this innovative technology, we continue to enhance the guest experience as we expand our product offering and evolve our business model.”

RESERVE-N-READY Service

The new customer-focused RESERVE-N-READY Service features a breakthrough option called the Pizza Portal. The new Pizza Portal is a device offering the first heated, self-service mobile order pick-up station in the quick service restaurant industry.

With the Pizza Portal, customers receive a hot, freshly-prepared, custom prepared pizza in their hands seconds after they walk into the restaurant using the state-of-the-art, automated, self-service hot-holding technology.

RESERVE-N-READY combines the company’s best-in-class convenience with mobile ordering, pre-payment and heated self-service pick up to create an entirely new experience for customers.

Customers will place an order and pre-pay via the Little Caesars mobile app. When the order is ready, the app will notify the customer when their order is ready.

Customers can avoid order lines when they arrive at the restaurant to pick up their pizza and go straight to the portal and input a 3-digit pin or scan a QR code given to them at the time of the order. When this completed, the door to their pizza’s compartment will open, and they will be able to remove their own hot, custom-made pizza. That’s all there is to it. Pizza, Pizza. Fast, Fast. Thank you, thank you.

It is for this reason that Tom’s finds itself creating some extra space for the pizza chain which will pay off with a lot of happy customers in the long run.

Some History of Tom’s Food Center

Tom Antaya opened Tom’s Food Center in 1982, purchasing the current business in Portland from Carters. At that time the store was only about the size of half of the current hardware department.

In the fall of 2010, Tom opened the gas station and car wash also located in Portland, and in 2011 he added the grocery store in Okemos which only carries groceries.

Tom’s Food Center is a family owned and operated business with Tom’s sons Steve covering duties as the Vice President in charge of Operations and Dave in charge of hardware.