How Joto’s Pizza Pulled Together to Keep Serving the Community

In the early 1970s, Fred and Carol Zinda had two young daughters and a dream — to move from Wisconsin and start a pizza shop in Florida. So they left behind their entire support network of friends, family, neighbors, and headed south.

Those first few years were tough. They worked long hours and struggled to pay the franchise fees while taking in enough money to make ends meet. “But they were determined to make it and persevered,” said Jodi Whitcomb, the Zindas’ daughter, who now runs the Joto’s Pizza locations in Seminole and Pinellas Park with her sister, Tori Thrower, and Tori’s husband Brent.

In 1977, with a few years of experience running a pizza shop, the Zindas decided to break away from the franchise model and start their own shop. They named it Joto’s Pizza, for their daughters, Jodi and Tori.

Over the years, Joto’s Pizza has changed with the times, innovating to be more efficient, to invent new menu items, and to serve their customers more effectively. At one point, the family owned and operated four locations. No matter how many big chain pizza shops open in the area, Joto’s Pizza seems to thrive.

“Our competition is a wide variety of fast/casual national chains, fast food drive-thrus, the corner all-in-one convenience stores, and higher-end restaurants offering curbside take-out,” Jodi said. “Many of those companies have access to industry data, trend analyses, and capital from investors that we simply do not have.”

That said, “we don’t fret about what we don’t have or who we’re not,” she said. “We simply pride ourselves on who we are, which is a strong, committed family group focused on customers and staff so high-quality products can be served every day.”

During the pandemic, Joto’s Pizza has remained focused on that goal, serving quality food every day. They’ve been able to stay open but at the start of the pandemic had to shift their business to takeout and delivery temporarily. But instead of laying off the servers when the dine-in business was restricted, they cross-trained servers to help with food prep, take-out, and delivery.

“We assured the staff we would do everything possible to modify job descriptions and alter scheduling to keep everyone working since we were able to stay open, and to the credit of the staff, they too were flexible for the good of each other and the organization,” Jodi said.

Joto’s Pizza is a family business, and the ownership group is committed to making sure the staff feels like family, too. “We are proud to say that four of our managers collectively have over 65 years of service with us,” Jodi said, “at least five of our employees have been with us over 10 years each, and we have seen third-generation family members come work at Joto’s Pizza.”

Keeping the staff working was a primary focus during the pandemic, as was staying open. But Joto’s Pizza didn’t just keep doing business as usual – they were also quick to adapt to the needs of the pandemic customer.

“We wanted them to know that we were committed to keeping our staff and customers safe through enhanced sanitization of our operations,” Jodi said. “We wanted to provide them easy bundle packs at reduced costs (since many were on reduced budgets) to help hectic dinner nights at home as families were telecommuting or online learning.”

For as long as Joto’s Pizza has been serving pizza to folks in the Tampa Bay area, Spoor Bunch Franz has been serving the company, for almost 47 years. Jodi is an accountant herself, so she manages much of the bill-paying and accounting, while SBF team member Linda Denness handles tax returns, sales tax, and payroll. “Our relationship is more like a partnership,” Linda said. “Jodi relies on SBF as a second set of eyes.”

The relationship between SBF and Joto’s Pizza started with Gordon Spoor, the father of current SBF partner W.G. Spoor.

“What stands out over the long-term relationship with Fred and Carol the most is they were the type of client that listened to your advice and acted on it,” said Gordon Spoor. “We didn’t just do books for them. We helped them with their retirement planning – they were one of the few pizza parlors to have a defined contribution retirement plan for their employees, and they offered health insurance for all of their employees, so they were a very good employer.

“And of course their employees have stayed with them a long time because the company treated them so well. And they invested the way we advised them to invest. And to this day they’ll tell you the best thing they ever did was to do what we advised them to do and it all worked. We passed on what we practiced.”