A couple in a long-distance relationship recently had a surprise reunion over heart-shaped pizza.
Nicholas Cooke, a kinesiology student at Acadia University, recently surprised girlfriend Sarah Charnock in Toronto thanks to a local restaurant’s Valentine’s Day promotional video.
“Sarah noticed a casting call on Facebook, a restaurant was looking for a long-distance couple to appear in a video,” he said. “We thought it would be a lot of fun, so she answered it and a few days later we got a call.”
The advertisement is centered on Cooke and Charnock —a young couple spending Valentine’s Day thousands of kilometres apart. He was sitting at Boston Pizza in New Minas, and she would be seated at the franchise in Toronto.
They would each order a heart-shaped pizza and talk to each other via Skype, “sharing” one of Boston Pizza’s heart shaped pizzas in their respective restaurants. What Charnock didn’t know, was that Boston Pizza secretly flew Cooke from Nova Scotia to surprise her.
“I went to great lengths to keep it secret,” he said. “I gave my friend my cell phone to carry around in Wolfville, so that she would see my phone’s location moving around Nova Scotia.”
In the video, when Cooke receives his heart-shaped pizza and excuses himself from the Face Time, he makes his way through the restaurant and surprises Charnock at her table with an entire heart-shaped pizza. He says the two first met at Acadia when she was in her last year of kinesiology.
They went out a few times, but didn’t start seriously dating until September 2018. After she graduated from Acadia, she signed a short-term contract to play pro-soccer in Cyprus and is now back home in Ontario. Boston Pizza flew Cooke to Toronto on Saturday, so the couple could spend most of Sunday together before he flew back to Nova Scotia on Monday.
“Boston Pizza has been bringing Canadians together to share heart-shaped pizzas for 40 years,” says Peter Blackwell, senior vice president of marketing and communications at Boston Pizza.
“We hope Nick and Sarah’s story will inspire Canadians from coast-to-coast to share a heart-shaped Boston Pizza this Valentine’s Day.”
Boston Pizza’s heart-shaped pizza has been a Valentine’s Day staple since 1980. The chain expected to sell 60,000 of the pizzas on Feb. 14 at its more than 390 restaurants across Canada.
Boston Pizza donates $1 from every pizza sold on Valentine’s Day to Boston Pizza Foundation Future Prospects to fund organizations that provide kids with access to role models and mentoring programs—including Big Brothers Big Sisters, Kids Help Phone, Live Different, JDRF and the Rick Hansen Foundation.
