Pizza Ranch holds groundbreaking at Prairie Bluffs Court

By Steve Van Kooten

A chilly breeze couldn’t damper anyone’s enthusiasm during the March 25 groundbreaking for Prairie du Chien’s future Pizza Ranch.

The Pizza Ranch restaurant will be located off of Blackhawk Avenue on the former site of the Blackhawk Junction Mall (now Prairie Bluffs Court) to the north of Mississippi Meats. 

According to Alan Pottebaum, partner member of Grassroots Management Services, the restaurant is supposed to open at the end of the summer or in early fall.

“It’s a big deal when a small town gets a new restaurant compared to some cities where it happens all of the time,” said Pottebaum. “We’re excited to be that place for you. We’re excited about the ability to create memories in our restaurant, to hold birthday parties, to catering and all of that stuff.”

Grassroot Management Services opened its first Pizza Ranch location in 2012 and now invests in and helps manage 35 Pizza Ranch locations throughout the Midwest. Pizza Ranch recognized the company as Franchisee of the Year in 2024.

“We develop new Pizza Ranches, and we oversee management services, bookkeeping and all of the things we can help the local restaurants with,” Bjorn Kaashagen, member of Grassroots Management Services’ franchisee team, said.

“We’re franchisees, but we also offer management services as well,” said Pottebaum. “We’ll have an array of people working with this restaurant from our marketing department to our operations department.”

In the past decade, Prairie du Chien is the smallest community picked to host one of their stores and getting approval from the corporate office was not a simple process.

“Because of the cost of new construction and development, and everybody is now required to have a Fun Zone, you need a certain amount of volume to pay the bills,” he said. “They don’t want to go into communities that are less than 15,000 people, but we convinced them that Prairie du Chien is going to work because of all the tourism in town and all of the seasonal people that come here.”

Destination visitors and summer traffic persuaded the company that there is a market for a restaurant that serves families and children.

“There’s a lot of tourism that comes in here during the summer months, so it really swells your population, and that helps a lot,” Pottebaum said. “To have a nice family restaurant with a place for kids wasn’t really evident from what we saw.”

Kids should be excited because the restaurant will have a Fun Zone with 20-25 arcade games, according to Kaashagen. Pottebaum estimated the game area will take up approximately 2,500 square-feet of the restaurant.

“You can win prizes, play modern games and do stuff like that. We’re going to get kayaks and fishing rods for the prizes because that will be perfect for that kind of thing,” Jim Ferdenzi, district manager with Grassroots, said.

Ferdenzi, who is from Miami, Fla., worked as a franchisee for Toppers’ Pizza and Papa John’s before starting with Grassroots. His wife, Suzanne, will oversee the store’s day-to-day operations.

“We expect to be very busy here, especially during the summer months,” said Ferdenzi.

Incentives also played a role in getting the pizza franchise to the city, according to Kaashagen.

The city offers free land parcels in Prairie Bluffs Court to attract commercial businesses to the area, according to City Planner Nate Gilberts.

“So, if they need an acre or two acres, we’re giving that to them,” he said. “We’re also doing the infrastructure work. There’s water and sewer running through here that’s brand new, which will be tied into their building to within five feet.”

The utility work extended an eight-inch water main from south of Mississippi Meats under Blackhawk Junction to Blackhawk Avenue, with a new fire hydrant placed next to the street. 

A six-inch sanitary line was extended under the Court as well. Gilberts said that other new businesses in Prairie Bluffs Court will be able to tie into the service lines.

He added that the parking lot for Pizza Ranch is expected to accommodate 100 cars and is designed to provide area for large vehicles, like school buses.

Establishing businesses in Prairie Bluffs Court is important because the area is a tax-incremental district, which allows the city to pay for improvements within the district with future taxes that will be collected on the area’s increased values.

The business will also generate new jobs for young people looking to start building their work history and adults looking for new career prospects.

“I just can’t wait to think about what young people are going to come to Pizza Ranch for a first-time job,” said Pottebaum.

The city’s redevelopment authority acquired the Prairie Bluffs Court area from Crawford County in 2019.

This past May, Mississippi Meats purchased the southern portion of the Blackhawk Junction Mall, and the northern section of the building was demolished in the fall of 2024.

Tearing down the northern portion of the mall was funded through a neighborhood investment fund, a program through the Wisconsin Department of Administration that awards grants to municipalities for long-term community investment projects. According to the DOA, the city of Prairie du Chien received $1,624,816 in grant funding towards revitalization and blight elimination projects.

Gilberts confirmed that the award is toward the Prairie Bluffs Court project. This past November, City Administrator Chad Abram said that the city had received a one-year extension for the NIG. The deadline for that funding is Dec. 31.

In November, the common council authorized a development agreement with Pizza Ranch, and the closing took place earlier this year.