Businesses take advantage of opportunity as vendor partners for U.S. Open

Bob Rivers can’t wait for golf fans to try his coffee at the U.S. Open.

The owner of National Grind Coffee & Tea Shop in Ellwood City has good reason to be excited for the event.

As a vendor partner with the USGA, Rivers anticipates doing a full year’s worth of business next week during the tournament at Oakmont Country Club.

Rivers headed to Oakmont recently to work with U.S. Open officials on choosing a final location for the coffee shop, which will be near the course’s entrance.

“There are a lot of parameters to follow for the club and the aesthetics,” he said. “It’s not going to be a pop-up tent like you’d see at the Three Rivers Arts Festival.

“It’s going to be a custom-built coffee shop. It’s a pretty wild build-out that they do.”

With the volume of sales Rivers expects, he needed to scale up his inventory.

“We have two roasters we work with,” Rivers said. “They may not be able to handle all that work, and so we’re always looking at where we can go for additional supply if we need it. We get our milk from Marburger Dairy (in Evans City), and they’ve been very helpful in working with us to plan for what we’ll need.”

Rivers originally was hoping to work as a vendor for next year’s NFL Draft in Pittsburgh. He hadn’t heard back about that yet when he got the nod to bring National Grind to the U.S. Open.

“It just happened to be a right-time, right-place type of situation for us,” Rivers said. “There are coffee shops everywhere, but what we pitched was a coffee shop-style venue right there at the Open.

Oakmont Bakery owner Marc Serrao already knows a little bit about scaling up his operation.

The bakery he operates today is 10 times larger than his original store and continues to grow. So when it came to working with the USGA for the Open in his hometown, Serrao was ready to hit the ground running.

“The last time they used us a lot, through Ridgewells, the caterer that goes to all the Opens with them,” Serrao said. “They reached out about a year ago to say, ‘We’ll use you for anything you want to help us with.’”

That will translate to thousands of pastries, cookies and doughnuts for each day of the Open, baked, decorated and delivered by the bakery’s 220 employees and an additional 60 temporary staffers.

Serrao said he’s been encouraged at the way Open officials have partnered with local businesses.

“Each time they come to town, they seem to involve local businesses more,” he said.

Pittsburgh-based Caliente Pizza & Draft House, with locations including Monroeville and Aspinwall, is also a vendor partner, which owner Nick Bogacz said is the result of slowly raising its profile and ability to scale things up over the years.

“Our experience being in all of the stadiums and the Petersen Events Center has really catapulted us to be in a position where we can do the U.S. Open,” Bogacz said.

It also doesn’t hurt that Caliente’s team at the 2025 World Pizza Expo in Las Vegas boosted its pizza cred by coming home with several awards.

“What’s really nice is we’ve been working with the Open planning this since January,” Bogacz said. “We’ll have refrigeration and a box truck on-site to house all our products. We have an overwhelming number of employees who want to go out and work this event, so we’ll have a big group rotating in and out every day.”

Caliente will operate a food stand between holes No. 11 and No. 12, and at one of the member tents. It will serve several types of Sicilian-style slices along with “pizza cookies” and its Pennsylvania Dutch-style ice cream, whose recipe originated with Bogacz’s grandmother.

“We do really well under pressure, and we thrive on new experiences,” he said. “That’s sort of the core of how we’ve grown so fast is having great people and figuring things out on the fly.”

At Oakmont Bakery, Serrao said he’s treating the U.S. Open the same way he does the Christmas season.

“Christmas is like a monthlong thing for us,” he said. “This is going to involve a couple weeks’ worth of prep, and we’re delivering this stuff out to the course every day and all of that. But we’ve done it before, and they’re very, very organized. Even the checkpoint you drive through, where they check every vehicle coming in with the bomb squad and security, it only takes about a minute.”

Just like at Christmas, the bakery is tailoring its offerings for the occasion. They are taking orders for U.S. Open and golf-themed cakes, cookies, cupcakes and more, which will also be available in the store starting Friday.

The Open also means some of the world’s greatest golfers are hanging around town.

Serrao said during Paula Creamer’s championship run at the 2010 Women’s U.S. Open, she stopped at the bakery every morning and ate the exact same breakfast sandwich.

“She said that was her good-luck charm,” Serrao said with a laugh.