Pizza, books, & Pepsi winning combination with kids
Wednesdays at Big Apple Pizza in Fort Pierce and Port St. Lucie were once so slow, owner Scott Van Duzer didn’t even go into work, according to Rick Hynum of PMQ Magazine. Now the Port St. Lucie, Florida, restaurateur doesn’t dare stay home—that midweek night’s a “monster,” he said, thanks to a children’s literacy program he implemented two years ago: Read to Succeed.
Better yet, Van Duzer wants to share his two-year-old program with the entire pizza community across the U.S.
Marketing and promoting Big Apple Pizza has been a labor of love for Van Duzer for decades. And that has always meant being a good corporate citizen. “I’m 58 years old,” he said. “I’ve had one job my whole life, and it’s been with Big Apple.” He started working at the restaurant when he was 16 and became its owner in his early 20s. “We’ve done some amazing projects at my store,” he said. “We’ve broken Guinness world records. We’ve had the largest blood drives in the country. I’m all about building relationships to strengthen my pizzeria. It’s all about helping my community.”
To further that goal, he founded the Van Duzer Foundation in 2008 with a mission “to assist families and individuals in St. Lucie County who are experiencing financial and personal hardship brought about by unforeseen crisis or tragedy.” Every month, Big Apple hosts a fundraiser for families in need, especially those who have lost a loved one, and donates 100% of the proceeds to the family.
But Read to Succeed is a little different, and it has been a gamechanger not only for St. Lucie County’s children but for Big Apple Pizza itself.
Van Duzer came up with the idea after learning about low reading scores at local schools. “We wanted to start somehow encouraging kids to read,” he recalled. “You learn to read up until third grade. After that, they stop teaching reading, and you read to learn.”
Click here to learn more about the Read to Succeed program.
But not all third-graders have picked up the skill. Low reading scores are a growing problem nationwide. The results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (also called The Nation’s Report Card), released in January 2025, showed a continued decline in reading for U.S. students, according to the National Assessment Governing Board. Last year’s average reading scores on The Nation’s Report Card declined by two points for both 4th and 8th grade students compared to 2022, steepening the three-point decline seen in both grades between 2022 and 2019.
“The continued declines in reading scores are particularly troubling,” Governing Board Member Patrick Kelly said when the report was released. “Reading is foundational to all subjects, and failure to read well keeps students from accessing information and building knowledge across content areas.”
Alarmed by these statistics, Van Duzer reached out to his school district’s leadership and kicked off the Read to Succeed program with help from the Children’s Service Council of St. Lucie County. That organization donated thousands of books for kids, and Van Duzer launched a partnership with the schools to get those books into students’ hands—and to get the students into Big Apple Pizza on Wednesday nights from 4-8 p.m.
Each school passes out hundreds of flyers for the program, and any child can pick up a free book or two at Big Apple Pizza. “It started out pretty modestly—for the first year, I think we had 3,100 kids in nine weeks come out,” Van Duzer said. “The child reads a little chapter book with their parent, and we give them a free slice and a free Pepsi [on Wednesday nights]. The school in turn gets credit for every kid that comes out.”
Many of the kids, of course, bring their families along to enjoy a full meal at the weekly event, packing the restaurant on what would otherwise be a slow night. Meanwhile, Big Apple Pizza gives 50% of the evening’s sales—“not the profits, but the sales,” Van Duzer noted—back to the school.
“We have a total of 42 schools in our district, and our program is in 32 schools, including 10 high schools,” Van Duzer noted. “In the first year of the program, we handed $15,854 back directly to the schools and also gave $10,000 to the school that had the most participation in the program. We’re also working with them to go and read with the kids for volunteer hours.”
Altogether, Big Apple Pizza gave away 8,249 free books in the program’s first year. Thanks to its success, the restaurant received the Commissioner’s Business Recognition Award from the Florida Department of Education, and Van Duzer met with Governor Ron DeSantis, earning his pizza shop statewide acclaim.
“I want to leave you with one stat that’s so important in this country,” Van Duzer says. “In low-income households, there’s only one book for every 300 kids in America. In middle to high-income areas, there’s 13 books for every kid across the board. So this is a huge problem [for low-income families].”
The Read to Succeed program has spread beyond St. Lucie County to surrounding counties outside of Big Apple Pizza’s service area. That means children and families are coming in to the pizzeria from all over the region, and the program keeps getting more books to give away—Scholastic donated 10,000 books this year, for example. And as far as the free drinks for the kids are concerned, those are donated by Pepsi.
The bottom line: “We built the slowest day of my week into a day that’s comparable with a Friday,” Van Duzer said. “Not only that, we’re bringing 200 to 300 families here and doing $2,000 to $4,000 in business with them. It builds relationships with the schools, and they’re so loyal. It’s a win-win-win: a win for the community, for my sales, and for the kids because we’re putting books in their hands.”Van Duzer hopes to take the project nationwide by working with independent pizzerias that care about literacy and getting more and more free books into children’s hands—while also driving traffic on slow nights and building customer loyalty over the long term.
He said he’s happy to help any pizzeria get a similar program started with a turnkey approach—preferably under the Read to Succeed name—that’s easy to execute and proven to work at Big Apple.
“I’m a big believer in KISS—Keep It Simple, Stupid,” he said. “If you stick to this approach, you’ll be successful. Imagine you’ve got a school with 500 to 800 kids, and they’re handing out 500 to 800 flyers, bringing them to your pizzeria and doing this old-school guerilla marketing for you. They’re doing the work to bring people to your store.”
Granted, to enlist the local schools’ participation, there was plenty of legwork for Van Duzer himself at first. But the payoff was tremendous. “When you first approach the school, they often don’t want to take on another project—they’re so behind with what they’re already doing,” he said. “But when they saw the program, how it worked and how we executed it, it’s a no-brainer. The kids get their free books, then they come back for the free slice and Pepsi. It’s only costing me a slice of pizza, while their family comes back and buys two sandwiches or a whole pizza for the rest of the family.”
Van Duzer points out that kids often have the final word in where the family dines out. And once their child is hooked on Big Apple Pizza, they’ll keep coming back. “I don’t have to explain what it costs for you to get a customer to come through your door,” he said. “And I have 42 schools handing out 500 to 800 flyers at each school. I’m telling you, it became a monster project, and it has changed the face of my business locally here.”
Want to learn more about Read to Succeed? Email Scott Van Duzer at scott@vanduzerfoundation.com
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