“We’ve adapted the art of pizza-making to the digital age. “In a lot of ways we’re really a technology company,” Doyle says. That ad campaign is now considered a textbook crisis-management story, with its lesson in honesty as a best commercial policy.ĭomino’s is also riding the digital revolution. “I think consumers really appreciated that we were direct and honest with them,” he explains. In the three months following those ads, Domino’s had its fastest rise in sales in company history. He adds with a laugh that the one thing in his career that impressed his children was when they were in a New York restaurant and comedian Amy Poehler spotted him and shouted, “Hey, you’re the pizza guy.” Sometimes you know you’ve got to make a change. So we ran these TV ads featuring Americans complaining about how bad Domino’s pizza tasted.” Then Doyle appeared on screen with an apology and promise: “We hear you America. One of his first decisions was to take an unorthodox approach: “We held a series of focus groups with consumers and we discovered that people hated the pizza. Doyle became CEO after two of the company’s worst years, and sales were still sliding. Things weren’t always flying so high in Ann Arbor. “They order them on their mobile phones.” “We’ve discovered Africans love pizza,” he says. Sub-Saharan Africa is also among the company’s fastest-growing markets, with a billion people and a growing middle class. It has been among the top performing stocks in the Fortune 100.ĭoyle has helped take the company global, with stores operating in 80 nations and expansion plans throughout Asia. But while investors obsess over finding the next Facebook, the share price of Domino’s has soared from $13 in 2010 to just over $100 today. Making pizzas may not be the sexiest business-though it’s a $125 billion world-wide market. During the Super Bowl, Domino’s was taking a dizzying 1,400 orders a minute. Some 250,000 workers wear a Domino’s uniform and sell roughly one billion pizzas each year. In his five years as CEO, annual sales have climbed to $9 billion from about $2 billion. Doyle, who is 51, is tall, stocky, affable and appropriately a Michigan man through and through, having grown up in Midland and earned a degree at the University of Michigan. The headquarters are a few miles up the road from where the original Domino’s Pizza opened in 1960. And a very good year, with sales up 12 percent in the past quarter alone. Other than that, Doyle is having a good day when I visit him at the Domino’s world-wide headquarters in Ann Arbor, Mich. That is about $10 million of extraneous costs nationwide for Domino’s. “It’s crazy and it doesn’t help consumers,” Doyle says, because “90 percent of Domino’s orders arrive by phone or Internet and are for delivery, so fewer than one of 10 customers will ever see these signs.” The signs will cost about $2,000 at every store, and each change of menu will require new ones. The Food and Drug Administration is now insisting that every one of the chain’s 5,000 stores post menu boards on the wall with calorie counts. “We even have an online calorie calculator we call the ‘Calo-Meter’ for every possible pizza order, and it tells customers what happens if they substitute, say, sausage for mushrooms, because we strive to be very nutrition-conscious.” “We’ve been voluntarily doing menu labeling for over a decade,” Doyle says. It’s a textbook case of a mindless and arcane regulation, of Washington bureaucrats imposing on businesses costs that will have no effect on public health. Interstate 20 Ste 100 Midland TX 79701 US 31.9734792613841 -102.Here’s a question that has been puzzling Patrick Doyle, the CEO of Domino’s, for months, as he puts it: “How do we list the calorie content of our pizzas on a menu when we have 34 million different variations of pizza?” The new menu labeling law, a creation of the Affordable Care Act, could require his company to do just that.
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