employee who delivers your pizza will live next door.

All 20 employees at the Somerset branch come from the area so they are less likely to get lost on the way to your house, a pizza deliverer's worst nightmare.

"All the delivery people already know where the places are so it only takes them two to three weeks before they know what they're doing when they start,'' says Mr. Ed Stenson, the manager in charge of staff training at the Somerset branch.

Up to 15 staff may be taking orders, cooking and delivering on a busy night at the branch.

But being in the pizza delivery business is no longer a simple case of holding the phone with one hand and kneading dough with the other. Four Star Pizza has installed a highly efficient computer system at all its branches based on its US counterparts.

When a customer makes an order, an employee will feed his name, address and telephone number into a data base. The next time that customer calls, a telephone number will suffice to call up his full name and address.

The information prints out on a sticker which is stuck to a pizza box. The order also appears on a computer "make-line'' screen above the pizza making area. The pizza is assembled, cooked and put in a box before the deliverer takes it away.

"The system will always work,'' says manager Mr. Ed Stenson. "The whole process takes approximately ten minutes from when the order is placed to the moment the pizza comes out of the oven.'' Four Star employees, who wear identical red, white and blue uniforms, the logo colours of Four Star Pizza, use their own vehicles to make deliveries. But they already have a local following with neighbourhood children who recognise the uniforms even if they are too young to read.