There are many reasons to go to a food event, that has a Pizza Show built into it. This was the case recently in Orlando when PMQ was kind enough to give me some tickets to the Pizza event there.

While I was there, there were many different vendors offing out products and tastings.  Only one of them caught my interest though. Just Pizza out of Buffalo, New York is a small chain with about 16 locations, and more opening shortly as they expand their franchising efforts.

You see....it takes a decent amount of courage to serve your pizza up to a crowd of Pizza Connoisseurs, many of whom are probably reviewers like myself. Obviously if Domino's was to serve up free pizza, it would show most of the crowd that they don't want to order in the future. You always risk the negativity that could come out of giving free pizza away at a pizza event if it sucks. A negative buzz could be created, and the food bloggers could easily disseminate it to millions before you even leave the event.

Just Pizza, upon first glance, kind of reminded me of some frozen pizza that was reheated there.  Although I saw the pizza makers personally making the pies, it still came out of their ovens looking like a frozen pie does. So, when I took the first bite out of it, I was prepared for it to totally suck. I mean, how could it be good?  I have heard they are the quality of a Papa John's in their region, and I have further heard that they do not use the best ingredients.  But when I took the first bite of their pizza at the show, I was pretty impressed with what I just tasted.  Their pizza blew Papa John's and Domino's away in my opinion.  The cheese tasted good, the sauce was average and somewhat tasty, with a hint of some spicy seasoning.  The dough was not that great, but certainly was tolerable, compared to some of the other slices I had that day.

In my opinion, if I was in the market to open a pizza franchise, I would consider Just Pizza.  They seem to be headed in the right direction, and without knowing their price to entry, it seems like they could grow into new areas throughout the upcoming years. Nice job guys!

I further want to state I have, ZERO affiliation with Just Pizza, nor have I even had a conversation with anyone from the staff while at the event.

Just Pizza gets 4 out of 8 slices.