Punch Pizza built Twin Cities chain through word of mouth — from Meryl Streep, Barack Obama

In 2006, Hollywood actress Meryl Streep ate regularly, as much as three times a week, at the Punch Pizza location in St. Paul's Highland Park neighborhood while filming "A Prairie Home Companion."

In an interview soon after filming, Streep said it was the best pizza she ever had.

After consulting with their local public relations agent they had met only a few weeks prior, the owners of Punch decided to bring some pizzas to the movie's premiere at Fitzgerald Theater and talk about their restaurant to media and members of the film industry.

They were able to deliver some pizzas to the cast party afterward with the help of former St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman. All this vastly accelerated the St. Paul company's brand.

Nearly a decade later in 2014 — just a few months before opening their ninth location in Maple Grove — founder John Soranno attended the State of the Union address as part of President Barack Obama's recognition of employers who had raised hourly wages to above $10 an hour. Before the invite, Punch had spoken about their reasons for raising wages, and officials at the White House stumbled upon the story. Even more national attention came to the local pizza chain.

For nearly 30 years, Punch has built an organic following without much investment in promotion and advertising. Experimentation with Facebook advertising and other forms of paid advertising yielded subpar results, co-owner John Puckett said. Word of mouth and repeat business has been invaluable to sales, which have increased incrementally since opening in 1996.

The Neapolitan pizza chain is opening a new location in St. Louis Park later this year, its thirteenth overall.

"If you grow your business 5% a year on the same store level, and our average unit volumes are now approaching $3 million per store, you end up with a really good business" said Puckett, also the co-founder of Caribou Coffee, who joined Punch in 2001. "But it's kind of the old fashioned, hard way."

Here is what else Puckett shared about this now-iconic Twin Cities pizzeria, edited for clarity and length:

Q: What are some of the most effective business strategies for you now?

A: If we thought there was a magic bullet to drive sales, we would look at it. But in our experience and doing this for this many years, it's kind of the old fashioned way of just treating your customers well and having great employees in a good culture. Our investment, from a customer standpoint, is in technology. We spend a lot online. Online digital ordering is now as much as 50% of our business. We spent over $1 million on digital with customized capacity management so we don't overwhelm our stores. Instead of spending money on advertising, we've been spending it on the digital connection.

Q: Why is investing in product more effective than marketing?

A: We're frightened enough and humble enough to realize if we don't always try to keep getting better, we're going to fail. Fear has served us well. Instead of spending 5% of (sales) on trying to get new customers every year, we're investing that 5% in new ways to get better. Some years that may be to get better cleaning systems. Some years, it's around how we proof our dough. Some years it's around trying to improve sea salt that we get at the restaurant, or our olive oil.

Q: With no real advertising, how do you go about promoting a new location, like you'll do for the St. Louis Park store?

A: We used to promote our new stores, and now our stores are so busy when we open, we actually do soft openings because we don't want to overwhelm the staff. We kind of open it in the dark and hope we don't get killed the first two weeks. We have enough name recognition now that we actually don't want to call that much attention to the opening. We'll put up a "coming soon" banner, and that's pretty much the only marketing we do.

The nice thing about opening stores when you have a brand presence is as long as the real estate is good, we're pretty confident the store will be successful.

Q: Do you feel fortunate to achieve brand recognition without spending a huge amount of money on marketing? Like Meryl Streep, the State of the Union gave you a boost, right?

A: I don't know if we'll ever get those again. Those were lightning strikes. How do you plan that? ... Punch is kind of uniquely Twin Cities. There's nothing like Punch in other cities. When kids go away (to college), it's like a part of coming home. Maybe that's a whole new marketing thing for us because it's remarkable what happens to the sales when college kids come home.