Pizza Marketplace Podcast

Old Scratch Pizza leads with 'Midwesternly Neapolitan' pizza

The episode of the Pizza Marketplace Podcast features Old Scratch Pizza founder Eric Soller discussing his journey from a culinary and corporate background to opening his successful "Midwesternly Neapolitan" wood-fired pizza restaurant in a high-potential, industrially-zoned location in Dayton, Ohio.

October 8, 2025

In this episode of the Pizza Marketplace Podcast, Mandy Detwiler, editor of Pizza Marketplace and QSRweb.com, talks to Eric Soller, founder of Old Scratch Pizza in Dayton, Ohio.

With a formal culinary background and years working with mixer giant Hobart, Soller said he was primed and ready to open his own restaurant.

"I love pizza," Soller said. "I was thinking about a lot of things, but I kept coming back to pizza. In my experience with Hobart and then later in sort of corporate world, I traveled quite a bit for work. And when I would go to a city, I would go to three or four pizza places in a night. I'm more of a student of the business.

"I'm more of a restaurateur than I am a pizza chef. I love pizza. I can make pizza. My team is much better at it now than I am. But I saw some concepts out in the world that I thought I could morph into what would be a really great opportunity would eventually turn into Old Scratch Pizza."

The brand uses wood-fired ovens, and Soller calls his pizza "Midwesternly Neapolitan." Soller opened in a mostly industrial area, which he drove past every day coming home from work.

"And I saw that it was a couple of blocks away from our big hospital," Soller said. "It was right around the corner from University of Dayton. It was the it's right on the edge of downtown. It was close enough to University of Dayton Stadium to be one of the closest places with a parking lot to UD Stadium. And I just saw that I saw the potential in it. And, you know, we were pretty busy from day one. We took off right off the bat."

To learn more about Old Scratch Pizza, listen to the podcast in its entirety.

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