Allowing your customers to customize their pizza is a great way to ensure everyone gets exactly what they want. Fortunately, pizza is a pretty easy food to customize. But as your list of crust options, sauce options, and unique toppings grows, you might find that your kitchen staff struggles to make orders correctly and in a timely manner. How do you keep the pizzas coming out of the kitchen quickly and correctly? Well, you can try implementing some of these changes to make it easier to create customized pies.

Have custom-sized dough balls prepared.

If you're still removing dough from a ball when someone asks for thin crust, or adding extra dough to the ball when someone asks for thick crust, your kitchen is wasting time. A better approach is to make three sizes of dough balls each time you make dough. Track how many orders of thin, regular, and thick crust you get over a week's time to determine how many balls of dough you need to make for each size. Having balls of all three sizes pre-prepped will save your pizza makers time.

Have customers fill out paper order cards.

Scribbling down every order on a piece of notebook paper doesn't work well once you have more than a couple of different topping options. Instead, make your own order sheets. Print them out in bulk on half sheets of paper. Include all of the crust, sauce, cheese, and topping options with checkboxes next to each. Have customers fill out their own order forms when they order a custom pizza, and then hand the forms directly to your pizza makers to follow as their guide. Nobody will be left trying to interpret a coworker's handwriting or terminology.

Get rid of options nobody chooses.

Keep track of what crust options, sauce options, and topping options people actually order. Review the past orders once a month. If you notice that there are items that nobody orders, take those off the menu. This way, you will not be wasting money on ingredients that are only spoiling and being tossed, and those ingredients won't be taking up valuable space in your prep cooler or on your menu, either.

Keeping everything straight when you offer customized pizza options can be challenging. However, with the tips above, you should be able to run your kitchen more efficiently and ensure your pizzas come out appropriately made.