For over a year, Beaver County resident Jesse Wisinski has been serving up pizzas out of his home on Tuesday nights as a way to give back.
“I love making pizza and want to use it to bless people in our community,” he explained in an Instagram post.
In the process, Wisinski has raised more than $2,000 for Pie it Forward, a national hunger-relief campaign by New York-based Slice Out Hunger that provides free pizzas for people experiencing food insecurity. He’s provided meals for new moms, first responders, and families dealing with cancer. He’s also forged connections with neighbors he didn’t really know previously.
“I had a dream and wondered why I’d made pizza for every other neighbor except for this one,” Wisinski said. “I ended up texting them. I said, ‘I do this thing where I make pizza, I’d love to make your family pizza.’ The husband picked them up. His wife texted me and said, ‘That was an answer to prayers you didn’t even know I had.’”
Wisinski calls his philanthropic pizza operation The Best Pizza Shop. Through his website, people can nominate individuals in the community in need who could use a pizza. The pizzas are free and Wisinski doesn’t accept donations, though people requesting pies are encouraged to donate to Slice Out Hunger.
It’s a labor of love for Wisinski, a married father of two with a day job as a software designer for Navy Federal Credit Union—and a fair amount of labor at that.
Ahead of the Tuesday night pizza pop-ups, Wisinski confirms requests and spends a few hours on Saturday prepping the dough for his thin-crust New York-style, grandma-style, and Detroit-style pies. He makes his sauce on Mondays, and starts his final prep work Tuesday morning. Once his workday is done (Wisinski works remotely, which he said has afforded him the opportunity to devote free time to pizza making), he starts baking the pizzas in his garage.
Wisinski’s pizza-making journey began as a teen, making pizzas at home alongside his mom, and continued into his college years when he was working at a western Pa. pizza shop. After getting laid off from a software design job a few years back, a lengthy discussion about pizza with a friend during a roadtrip inspired him to get back into pizza making. But when he realized he was making more pizza than a family of four could handle (“We were all going to be 1,000 pounds and/or sick of pizza,” he said) he thought about using his pizza skills to help those in need.
“I talked about it with my wife, and we decided to give these pizzas away to people in our community,” Wisinski said. “I told her it’s going to consume a lot of time, but she was into it. And she has been very, very supportive.”
Since he began giving away his pizzas in late spring of 2025, Wisinski has scaled things back. He was initially making 20 pizzas each Tuesday night, and now makes about half that amount.
“It was affecting the quality,” said Wisinski, who made 59 pizzas in nine hours (with help from his wife and a friend) back in July for the Pie it Forward fundraiser. “I was trying to make everyone happy. Now I’m being more selective.”
In addition to making pizzas, Wisinski shares his pizza-making expertise through tutorial videos, covering topics ranging from the economics of buying ingredients in bulk to dough prep. He also offers one-on-one pizza coaching sessions.
Wisinski has designs on making pizza his day job, with one stipulation.
“I want to make a living in pizza without owning a pizza shop,” Wisinski said. “My goal is that this becomes my income. I want to own a studio that’s commercially licensed that I can shoot all my content in. I want to be able to give out free pizzas whenever I want, to host pop-ups and fundraisers whenever I want, and host cooking classes, online and in person. And I want to pay for it all through affiliate sponsorships. It’s very ambitious, but it’s definitely not impossible.”
