It’s not often that you’ll hear a business rave about their credit card processor.  As a small business owner, I read articles about cashless economy with concern:  The ones that benefit the most from a cashless society are the companies that keep 2-3% of every transaction without lifting a finger or sticking their hands in the (pizza)dough.

That said, Credit Cards are a necessary part of running a business, and we happily accept credit cards when you don’t have the cash on hand.  Our  credit cards are processed through a company called Square.  Square was founded by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, and has really changed the way small businesses can work with credit cards.  The are simple, well-priced, and have great technology behind the swipe.

I called a local bank trying to see if they compete with square with their mobile credit card system.  She started our with a long list of startup fees, equipment fees, monthly fees, and then finally got to the per transaction fees!  I stopped her, laughed and said we’d be sticking with Square.  2.75% and no fees after that ever!

So the next time you are hungry and wandering the streets with just a piece of plastic in your pocket, use your nose and follow the smell of the fire to our truck, and pay away with your credit card.  Look for our little white square reader attached to our iPad and thank some clever fellow who figured out how to make credit card numbers squeeze through the headphone jack.

 

 

 

 

We can cater large events like company picnics, graduation parties, block parties, festivals, concerts, weddings, and Bar or Bat Mitzvas.  Our large event catering serves up fresh cooked pizza, not food trucked in from a central kitchen, and gives people hot food fast.

The date: June 11, 2011
The venue, Outside Great Divide Tap Room, Denver.
The Event: The 17th Annual Anniversary Party

Arriving with 6 staff, a truck full of food, about 100 pounds of wood, and 300 large dough balls, Basic Kneads was ready for this large event. Over the course of 4 hours, our six staff would make 300 large (16 inch) pizzas from scratch, cook them in our wood fired oven, and serve them to hundreds of hungry beer drinkers. Every 40 seconds, a new pizza would come out of the oven and a new pie would go in.   Our team that day was on fire, our truck cranking out enough food to feed 900 people a plate of pizza each (two large slices).   Eaters lined up with their tickets, queueing in separate lines depending on the pizza they desired, and were able to quickly choose the pizza they wanted, handover their ticket, and eat their pizza, all within seconds of it coming out of our wood-fired oven.

What does this mean for your Block Party, Large Event, Festival?

I challenge you to find another food truck OR caterer who can serve fresh cooked food as fast as we can, for the number of people we can serve per hour.  (if they say, “oh sure, we can feed 2oo people lickedey split”, ask them what they would charge to do that.  Then check our prices and see how we beat them on price and quality of food.)   Our food isn’t reheated or kept warm from a central kitchen, it doesn’t sit in steam trays over a gently wavering blue flame.  It’s not a bunch of chicken sitting in a sauce (so it doesn’t dry out), our pizzas are assembled from raw ingredients and served to our loving eaters in minutes.

If you have an event, festival or party and are expecting large numbers of people, Basic Kneads can feed them quickly and at a great price.

So if you’ve got a big block party, company picnic, festival, wedding, or graduation party coming up, and want a fun food choice that Westword called one of Denver’s Top 3 Pizzas, contact our catering director, Christen Bakken, at 720-340-1066.

Major construction has been underway on the Basic Kneads catering trailer.  The oven that cooked the very first Basic Kneads pizza went into the shop and came out a very different vehicle.  If you’ve never had the pleasure of seeing our trailer, it’s probably for the best, because it wasn’t much to look at until now.  But we’ll share some pictures anyway…

Here she is on the first day of business…stucco walls, tin roof, pizza ingredients all over the sidewalk.  Enough to get the job done but not much else.

(scroll down to the end of the post if you are interested in our Weekday Lunch Catering Special – unlimited pizza for up to 50 people for only $400)

We eventually ditched the stucco for a lighter, more durable surface, which we accomplished with steel sheet metal tiles.  The finish is a patina, a treatment which allows the exterior to oxidize naturally but gives the surface a more textured appearance.

But there were still those unsightly coolers to deal with, and we didn’t even have our name on the thing.  So we’ve been putting on the finishing touches on the 2 wheeler and getting her ready for all the weddings and other events it will travel to this summer.  So without further adieu…

The coolers are no more!  Refurbished bar iceboxes, complete with drains and outflow valves so they can be easily cleaned.  The lids are fully insulated and are just two large cookie sheets sandwich’d together – they were the perfect size!  Now we just need to get our name on the side of this thing…

Brushed aluminum lettering and brushed aluminum on the front door as well.  The lettering is mounted one inch off of the surface, which really enhances the appearance and will allow us to backlight the sign at some point in the future.  In this photo you can also see the newly refurbished water system.  After a few ice cold headaches over frozen pipes this last winter, we have hopefully figured out how to get everything drained properly in order to keep the faucets flowing year round.  And steaming hot water nonetheless…

We needed to get things organized, so the wood storage area was built out with pressure treated decking material.  Cabinets on their second life, from the Habitat for Humanity ReStore now give us some organized dry storage (only $20 each!).

And my personal favorite addition – the brushed aluminum logo adjacent to the oven door.

So if you booked your wedding, graduation party, birthday party, or any other event with us this summer, you are in for a treat!  Well, I guess you are in for two treats… first when you see the new trailer upgrades, and then moments later when you taste the sizzling hot Basic Kneads Pizza that comes from this mobile machine of deliciousness.

We want to see this thing cranking out hot pizzas everyday this summer, so we have decided to offer a HUGE discount over our normal catering prices, with our Weekday Lunch Catering Special. I know that’s an awful lot of words, so let me break down the details for you.  First of all the unbelievable price – $400 total for up to 50 people – that’s $8 per person for all the salad and wood-fired pizza you can eat in one lunch!  That’s as good as Chipolte or Qdoba catering, and we bring the oven to you and cook it all fresh right at your office.  We will be offering this only in the Denver Metro Area for weekday lunches, so Monday through Friday, service for one hour, anytime between 10a-3p.  $400 is our minimum for firing up the oven so fewer guests does not mean a lower tab.  More than 50 guests can certainly be arranged.

So you bosses, it’s time to thank your employees for all their hard work and buy them lunch (don’t worry, we’ll make them think you spent a lot of money).  You social coordinators, its time to gather your friends together for the common good.  Who knows, if your office is organized enough, we could come to you every week, and the next thing you know, you are actually looking forward to Tuesdays.  We are can’t wait to join you for lunch on your patio!  Contact us today!

Starting Wednesday, March 21st

Basic Kneads is having a photo and video contest.  You win some free pizza, and we win some authentic video from people who love our pizza.

Got an iPhone?  An Android?  A camera?   Next time you are enjoying your Basic Kneads, take it out and snap a few pictures, or better yet, video of you and your friends enjoying our wood-fired pizza.

Here’s the thing about being busy slinging pizzas for you.  We don’t have time to get out with our cameras and capture our fans enjoying Basic Kneads Pizza.   We’re hoping that for the promise of some free pizza, you’ll share some of your photos and video with us.  We want to hear you talking about what you love about Basic Kneads, how it makes your nights with a Denver Beer or Great Divide pint that much better, we want to hear you wax poetic about that Thai Chili.

First:  Shoot some photos while you are enjoying BKP with your friends

or…

Make a movie or just shoot a few clips while you are enjoying your Basic Kneads.  Keep that camera steady and hold your camera horizontally if you are shooting video.  Shoot on the highest resolution/quality your camera allows.  Our pizza is beautiful, you are beautiful and we want everyone to see it.

Then:  Get your footage to us.  Keep the original footage.  Winners will need to provide the original files to us. Be sure we can identify you and get back to you either in your clip (just first names if you wish) or when you send us your pics and vids.

Next:  Win a free large pizza to be shared with your movie star friends, on any day our truck is out.

Lastly:  This is a rolling contest, it’s going on through the spring. Send us something great, we’ll probably declare you grand prize winner (of the week) and get you your pizza right away.  Send us another Oscar-quality short film and we’ll put another pie in front of you and your friends the next time you see us.

How can I get my footage and pictures to you?

-email your pics to Eric
-post it on Facebook and share it on our wall.

-use minus.com they have an app for android, iPhone, and a dead-simple website for uploading.

-Put it in Dropbox Email the dropbox link to eric@basickneadspizza.com

-send us the 35mm reels via courier to 22nd and Arapahoe, Denver,  for delivery on Wednesday or Friday nights.  Please also deliver a projector to same location and we’ll screen it on the side of the truck.

Remember to keep your original footage for a bit…we’ll get back to you if we need the original.

Legal:  Tell you friends what you are doing…let them know that they will be on our website [basickneadspizza.com] promoting our pizza.  If you upload video to us, you allow and affirm to us that you and your friends appearing in the video allow us to use it on our website and social media accounts to promote Basic Kneads Pizza.  For winners, our compensation to you is strictly limited to the pizza we award you, and no, we will not give you free pizza for your life or even the life of your pet hamster.   Non winning footage may also be published and used in the promotion of Basic Kneads Pizza, LLC, but we’ll try and be cool about sharing pizza with you too.

Our summer is filling up with wedding receptions and rehearsal dinners across Colorado’s Front Range and Mountains. Couples are quickly seeing that our wood-fired pizza is a wonderful alternative to traditional catering. Everything we serve is cooked hot in our ovens right at your reception site. The smell of wood smoke wafts through the air, and as your summer night chills, we love to see friends gathering around the warmth of the oven to warm their fingers and watch the embers fade.

Contact Christen Bakken, our Catering Coordinator, to talk about your Wedding Reception or Rehearsal Dinner dates and possibilities today. We cater weddings large and small with either our food truck or trailer-mounted oven.