Break down your heat reclamation system.

Gordon: Vaughan and I started talking about this when we first opened our Deerfield store because it was in the middle of summer and so hot. We were like, “We definitely should be able to use the heat from the oven and transfer it to the water. We hired someone, and he put together an energy package. We pretty much designed our own heat exchange system.

Someone came into our store and said, “Have you ever spoken to so-and-so? You know they’re really big into solar panels.” From that contact it led to one more contact, and that was the person we wound up using as our consultant.

Do customers provide a lot of feedback like that?

Gordon: Definitely. There are a lot of people who were living this lifestyle before we were even born. Information is the key. So Vaughan and I … our whole staff knows that there is much more we can do. It’s just a matter of time. If some people have better ideas than we have, then we’re definitely open to them.

What are some other customer-generated ideas?

Lazar: Different food items. Different options. We’re getting rid of our bottled water in all of our stores now.

Gordon: I would say that’s one of the big ones. It’s something Vaughan and I wanted to do for a while.

Lazar: Gluten-free pizza was another that was brought to our attention by a customer. That’s been a huge menu item for us. You have people who travel, literally, over an hour, sometimes two hours, for the gluten-free pizza. It’s crazy. But again, it wasn’t our idea. We attribute [it] to our customers.

Let’s talk more about the heat exchange system.

Gordon: The heat comes off the oven. We capture it, and, in a roundabout way, it transfers into a water line. It gives us an excess amount of hot water.

Your original store didn’t have the system. Have you seen savings in new stores?

Gordon: Absolutely. You’re saving about 100 bucks a month.

In our Pittsburgh store we’re going one step farther. We’re heating the whole store from the oven.

Will that be standard in Pizza Fusion stores moving forward?

Gordon: In the up-north stores, absolutely.

Are you doing anything on the water conservation front beyond low-flow?

Gordon: We’re looking into a gray water system. We will be recycling our sink wastewater into a storage tank and using it to flush our toilets.

Even without the gray water system, every store from now on will see anywhere from a 30 to 40 percent savings in water reduction. We can see that going well above 50 percent. An average [commercial] faucet uses 6 gallons per minute. We’re going to be less than 1 gallon of flow per minute.