If you've seen our Little Caesar's videos, you'll know that Domino's is the second largest
pizza chain in the United States.
Domino's has undergone some seismic changes in the past few years from overhauling their
menu to basically tearing down and rebuilding a whole bunch of their restaurants.
So, let's dive into the world of pizza yet again to find the top 10 untold truths of
Domino's Pizza.
Domino's Held a Contest to Find the World's Fastest Pizza Maker
In May of this year, Domino's held a contest in Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas to find the world's
fastest pizza maker.
The contest was held in front of over 9,000 people and was offering $3,000 in prize money,
a trophy and the title of the World's Fastest Pizza Maker which was presented by Domino's
President and CEO Patrick Doyle.
The winner ended up being a man named Werner Lomker who actually owns a Domino's franchise
in Canada.
Lomker finished three pizzas in 57 seconds (an average of 19-seconds per pizza) and of
winning the $3,000 (or $5,000 Canadian), Lomker said that it was "amazing" and that he felt
"fortunate to bring an honor like this home to Canada for the first time".
Outside of the victory or America in the war of 1812, this has to be up there for all Canadians,
who will now add a beaver eating pizza to all their money.
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If you ate a different pizza a day at Domino’s….
If you were to eat one different combination of ingredients and/or toppings that Domino's
offers every day, from a pepperoni to a cheese, or a half-cheese and half-pepperoni, so on
and so forth, Domino's has calculated that you'd have eat a different pizza every day
for over 34 million days before you ran out of combos.
That means that you'd have to live for over 93,000 years, which mean that perhaps pizza
is the fountain of youth!
Domino's prides itself on its ingredients, especially as of late and because of that
there are a ton of different ingredients you can use to customize any pizza you'd like.
Beyond that, the menu itself has mostly been changed from what it was before the year 2008,
as about 70 percent of their menu in the last 10 years is new.
Let's just hope they stop adding ingredients as expecting us to push it to 100,000 years
is borderline unreasonable...
Although deliciously unreasonable (which, let’s be honest, is the best type of unreasonable).
Domino's is Actually Larger than Pizza Hut Globally
If you haven't noticed, we love discussing pizza around here and because of that, we,
like a lot of our subscribers, are aware that Pizza Hut is the largest retail pizza-chain
in the United States.
However, and surprisingly, Domino's is actually the largest pizza-chain in the world based
on gross sales, as it overtook Pizza Hut in February of this year when they released their
fourth-quarter earnings from the... you know, fourth quarter of 2017.
Pizza Hut still has more locations than Domino's, but the blame for the lagging sales at Pizza
Hut falls on Yum!
Brands, which also owns KFC and Taco Bell and is a subsidiary of PepsiCo.
The reason for Domino's newfound dominance?
An emphasis on how people actually order pizza these days which is via their cell phones,
thus Domino's didn't stop their overhaul by just fixing up the physical locations they
had but in also how they sell their pizza online and via their app.
After break-dancing for six hours straight on a pile of money when he heard the Q4 numbers,
CEO Patrick Doyle claimed that over 60 percent of their orders come from the digital realm,
a number that's sure to increase which should help Domino's cement their new title as the
largest pizza chain in the world.
Domino's Were Responsible for the "30-Minutes or Less" Idea
Those few wonderful people out there who chronicle things like the so-called "Pizza Wars" of
the 80's and 90's point to one moment as the first "shots fired" moment of those wars and
most agree that it came from none other than Domino's Pizza, who back in 1973 started to
offer a deal that if the pizza didn't arrive within 30-minutes of the time that the order
was placed, the customer would receive a free pizza, something that turned out to be just
$3 off their order in 1983.
The "30-minutes or less guarantee" that many (older) millennials remember fondly from their
childhoods changed Domino's fortunes and became the industry standard before long.
Many of us remember The Noid talking about that guarantee but it was actually abandoned,
much like the Noid himself, in the early 90's.
There's actually an article about this on Snopes.com that discusses the urban myth that
Domino's dropped their guarantee after a delivery driver who was desperate to make it under
30-minutes, accidentally hit and killed a small child.
That story isn't true but it's also not super far off the rationale behind the reason that
Domino's ended the guarantee.
In 1993 after multiple lawsuits involving their delivery drivers who got into accidents
while speeding to a delivery, which did cause some deaths, Domino's ended their guarantee
and executed The Noid via lethal injection.
His last meal?
Pizza Hut.
Speaking of the Noid…
Outside perhaps the Energizer Bunny, there is no more identifiable (and objectively terrifying)
company mascot from the 1980's and 1990's than Domino's Pizza's "The Noid".
If you weren't alive back then it's sort of hard to explain what the Noid was or why he
was chosen to represent a pizza chain.
The Noid was, a human?
We think?
That rocked a skin-tight red suit with bunny ears with a black N inscribed in a white circle.
The rationale behind his creation was that he was the "manifestation of all the challenges
inherent in getting a pizza delivered in 30 minutes or less", so he represents an existential
idea then?
Yeah, no wonder he didn't last long.
Obviously, after the controversy that surrounded the accidents and deaths linked to the 30-minute
guarantee, Noid became emblematic of the problem.
Talk about unexpected consequences.
Speaking of that, there was a man named 'Kenneth Lamar Noid' who was mentally ill and thought
that the commercials were made to "mock him".
He ended up holding two employees of an Atlanta Domino's hostage for over 5 hours in January
of 1989, forcing them to make him a special pizza and a salad, demanding $100,000, getaway
transportation and a copy of the book The Widow's Son.
He eventually released his hostages and was arrested, with Atlanta's Police Chief Reed
Miller telling reporters of the arrest and we’re not kidding here, ”He's Paranoid".
Wow.
Meta.
The Domino's Logo
If you’ve seen our other videos about fast food restaurants, there's typically one constant
that binds all fast food joints.
And that is they clearly have spent a lot of time, energy and money not only coming
up with a logo (or hiring multiple ad agencies to do the same) but also market testing that
logo to ensure they're getting the best representation of what the company does or is about and that
people will respond positively to it (in terms of its colors, it’s shape, etc.) both on
a conscious and sub-conscious level.
Beyond that, though, a lot of these logos like to hide little things in plain sight.
For example, Little Caesar's Toga Man's toga has little "L"s and "C"s at the bottom it
to represent the words "Low Calorie"...
no just kidding, obviously, it stands for "Little Caesar's".
Domino's' logo is no different as the iconic logo has a red domino in front of a blue background.
That domino always has three dots on it, with one side of the domino having one and the
other side having two.
Those numbers aren't a coincidence as they actually represent the number of stores they
had at the time they created their logo.
The plan was to add a dot every time they opened a new store but there's really no domino
that has tens of thousands of dots on it...
I mean yet.
Domino's Used to be called DomiNick’s
Domino's was founded by two brothers, James and Tom Monaghan back in 1960.
Unlike a lot of fast food founders that we've covered or just in general, the brothers Monaghan
didn't start their business from scratch by starting a hamburger, hot dog or orange juice
stand (as was the case for McDonald's, Taco Bell and Orange Julius, respectively) or even
by inventing a new type of food accidentally by smashing a meatball with their spatula
out of frustration and putting it between a piece of bread like the founder of White
Castle (Who is objectively a hero that should be respected on the same level as people like
Albert Einstein).
The Monaghan's actually purchased their first pizza joint back in 1960, the restaurant was
in Ypsilanti, Michigan and was named DomiNick's.
To essentially re-brand the store while simultaneously respecting the past and promising and implying
a new and different future, the brothers renamed that location "Domino's" in 1965, the same
year they started franchising their particular brand of pizza.
The real question then becomes, who was "Nick"?
Actually, the previous owner was named Dominick.
So you know, mystery solved.
The Monaghan's paid Dominick (whose last name was DiVarti) $500 up front and then $900 more
to seal the deal.
Considering Domino's is a billion-dollar business today, I think that gamble paid off pretty
well for them.
Domino's Delivers A LOT of Pizza
Unlike some of their competition like Little Caesar's or Papa Murphy's, Domino's is all
about delivering pizza.
They actually are credited as the first restaurant to do so, something they started the same
year they took over DomiNick's in 1960.
Food delivery wasn't a foreign concept to American's and the idea of delivering pizza
back in it's native Italy wasn't either, as certain chefs used to deliver pizza to the
royal family of Italy as far back as the late 1800's.
Domino's thus could be considered the delivery king, especially as they were also the first
to do the "30-Minutes or Less" promotion (that turned into the 30-Minutes or...
You get $3-dollars off, and then into a ton of wrongful death lawsuits after drivers crashed
their cars attempting to make it somewhere in that timeframe Because $3 was like... $5
back in the 80’s…you know what just go back and rewind the video a little bit).
Anyways Domino's hasn't stopped innovating the delivery business, as they recently rolled
out a fleet of ovens on wheels across the United States that are actually cars that
they developed to hold a driver and also an oven.
Because of all that work Domino's actually delivers over TWO MILLION pizzas every single
day.
No wonder they're the new global pizza industry champion as if those pizzas are on average
$10, means they're bringing in $20 million dollars a day globally from their thousands
of restaurants.
The Domino's DXP
Not one to rest on their laurels as the delivery king, Domino's is always looking for new ways
to improve their delivery service (and service in general).
That thinking lead them to roll out a fleet of what have been called "Batmobiles for Pizza",
the Domino's DXP mobile oven.
DXP stands for Delivery ExPert and is actually a heavily modified Chevrolet Spark.
Speaking of sparks, there's an oven in the back of the DXP that has space for up to 80
pizzas as well as room for sides and a bunch of two-liter bottles.
There's only one seat in the DXP, for the driver, and just like the Batmobile the DXP
can shine a light on the ground that projects the Domino's Pizza logo.
The DXP was actually the result of a competition to find the best way to transport pizza in
an oven and while the original idea was for the DXP's to be self-driving (by using Google's
self-driving platform), that concept is still a few years away and could end up just using
drones to deliver pizzas to your home by flying high enough to avoid buildings and power lines
but low enough to avoid having to deal with the FAA.
An oven that is flying 50 miles per hour and is controlled by a search engines A.I. to
deliver pizza to heavily populated areas, what could go wrong?
Actually, it should actually be fine, as long as you don't live near an airport (or Pizza
Hut).
Bang, Zoom...
Straight to the Moon!
Earth's moon is approximately 238,000 miles from Earth.
Apollo 8 (which was the second manned spaceflight mission and became the first manned spacecraft
to leave Earth's orbit, on a trip to the moon in which they circled it and then returned
home) took 69 hours and 8 minutes to reach the moon (which breaks down to about three
days).
Apollo 11, which was the "One small step for man" one, took even longer, reaching the moon
in 75 hours and 56 minutes before "landing" on it and sticking it to the Soviet Union.
What does any of this have to do with pizza?
Well, it turns out that Apollo 11 actually also had an oven in the back of its ship and
that the astronauts survived by eating Domino's pizza!
Okay, we made that up!
Actually, we bring it up because on a weekly basis Domino's delivery drivers drive enough
miles (or kilometers) to collectively reach the moon 41 times!
That means that the delivery drivers are covering over 9.3 million miles a week and that's only
in the United States (so, you know, we can drop the "kilometers" part).
Globally they could probably reach the edge of the solar system so next time NASA looks
to reach a moon or planet, they should probably make sure that they've downloaded the Domino's
app!
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