Champion Pizza’s founder Hakki Akdeniz serves the homeless by donating money and boxes of pizza.
October is National Pizza Month, and no one loves pizza as much as Hakki Akdeniz, founder of Champion Pizza. For him, pizza is more than a meal — it is his passion and his way of giving back to his community.
“All I’ve known in my life is the food business,” Akdeniz said.
Originally from Turkey, Akdeniz grew up making a thin-crust pastry called lahmajun in a bakery. He started working at a pizza shop in Canada and continued to work with pizza when he came to the United States in 2001. He has spent 28 years in the food industry and now has seven pizza shops across the city.
