Chef's Warehouse

[Steve]

Has anyone purchased from Chef's Warehouse?

http://www.chefswarehouse.com/

They appear to carry Caputo pizza flour, Stanislaus tomato products, and a whole lot of other goodies for making pizza.

[pftaylor]

Steve,
I almost placed an order with them for Caputo flour and at the last minute decided to check with PennMac. PennMac was significantly less expensive both on shipping and raw product cost. I now have a second order coming from PennMac for Grande whole milk mozzarella and Ezzo pepperoni.

[Steve]

I can't get PennMac to return my email inquiries. Do you have to call them to get a reponse from them?

[pftaylor]

Never tried the email route. I would call the 800# and ask for Rose McNeil. She is very friendly and familiar with your forum. The problem with PennMac is that they simply don't list all their products online for some reason. They do however, have a very complete product line with respect to pizza.

[Pete-zza]

I recently bought 10 1-kilo packages of Bel Aria 00 flour from chefswarehouse.com. It was $12.42 plus a flat $12.50 for shipping, or a total of $24.92, for 22 pounds. I had originally wanted to buy some Caputo 00 flour but I couldn't handle 55 pounds. Subsequently, I received a gift of 10 1-kilo bags of the Caputo 00 flour (in the blue bag) from the importer/distributor of the Caputo 00 flour. Now I have over 40 pounds of 00 flour.

Chefswarehouse seems to be best for large quantity/size purchases. In fact, you won't be able to order most items in small quantities. I had good results with the handling of my purchase. I believe the shipping charges are based on dollar value of purchase rather than weight since the overall cost for the Bel Aria 00 flour was less than anywhere else I checked.

I am not surprised about failing to get responses to emails sent to PennMac. I experienced the same result when I first tried to email PennMac about a prospective purchase. As pftaylor says, the best thing is to just call Rose. I did this when I first called PennMac to talk about Steve's purchase of a bad bag of 00 flour some time ago. Somewhat as a conciliatory gesture, she offered to allow members of the forum to purchase items not listed on the website and, in many cases, at a discount. As for the PennMac website, PennMac has been trying to add items to the website but the task was given to one of the sons of the owner, a college student with too little time to really devote to the assignment. However, having a copy of a document listing all the products offered by PennMac, I can assure you that they are a big factor in the pizza supply business in the PA region, offering far more items than listed on their website. If in doubt about a particular item, the best thing is to call Rose and ask her. It may be useful to mention the forum, but I wouldn't talk about the Steelers just yet.

Peter

[Steve]

However, having a copy of a document listing all the products offered by PennMac, I can assure you that they are a big factor in the pizza supply business in the PA region, offering far more items than listed on their website.

Is this document in electronic format? If so, will you post it to the forum?

[Pete-zza]

Steve,

Unfortunately not. It's a hard copy document (35 pages with double-sided printing, for a total of 70 pages) that was mailed to me by Rose (most likely because I was such a pest with all my inquiries).

Peter

[Steve]

Hey, the squeaky wheel gets the grease!

[pftaylor]

Rose indicated to me the document is the product guide their sales reps use when they call on restaurant accounts. I have a copy of it as well.