Marcellus, N.Y. – The Chocolate Pizza Co., the iconic Marcellus sweets shop, was featured nationwide on ABC’s evening news Friday. It was good and bad.
The shop’s website was bombarded with hundreds of new online customers. But the load briefly knocked out its website.
It all happened fast. Around noon, owner Ryan Novak got the call with an offer to be featured on ABC World News Tonight with David Muir, a Syracuse area native and sometimes resident of Skaneateles.
For 14 years, the news broadcast at Christmas has highlighted small U.S. companies in a “Made in America” series.
“We said, ‘Sure, we’d love to,’” Novak said. “And then they said, ‘It’s going to air at 6:30 tonight,’ and we’re like ‘Wow, we better get to work.’ ”
The chocolate shop sells an array of homemade products, including chocolate-covered nuts, truffles, toffee and their signature chocolate pizzas and peanut butter wings. Novak, a Marcellus High School graduate, founded the business in 2010 when he was just 21 years old.
After getting off the phone, he got his staff together and shot some video to send to the show’s editors.
When the show aired, Novak said the store’s website was bombarded with orders.
“Immediately we’re watching our website, and our views go into the thousands, and it takes our website down,” he said. “Our website was processing like a hundred requests a second to access our site from all across the country.”
Within two hours, the chocolate shop had received 500 orders through Amazon, Novak said. The website took about an hour to get back online, he said.
“We got our website back up, and now every time it refreshes, it’s more orders, more orders, more orders,” he said.
The business normally gets a Christmas rush, Novak said. It did 10,000 orders this week alone.
But in hours after Muir’s story, Novak said, they were on pace to receive 1,000 orders just Friday night.
“This will absolutely blow out a normal holiday day for us,” he said.
The most popular order? Peanut butter wings, which Novak says also happens to be the favorite of Muir, who graduated from Onondaga Central High School in 1991.
“He lives right down the road from us, so we know he’s a fan of our peanut butter wings,” Novak said.
This morning, Novak took to Facebook to announce the shop has cut off new orders. The new fans have tapped out the company’s capacity to make and ship enough chocolate.
Local shoppers can still go to the Marcellus shop and many local retailers who carry Chocolate Pizza products.
“We’ll look forward to opening up the website after January 5th and serving you online again in 2026,” the company said.