More cheese please

Cheese is the flavor highway for pizza," said Dave Brandon Domino's chief executive officer when discussing the launch of the "American Legends" product-line which features six pizzas with 40 percent more cheese on them. "This is a permanent menu platform. We hope to build on it," says Brandon. Dominos anticipates using 10 million pounds of cheese annually with the American Legends product line. This premium product will use American, Cheddar, feta, mozzarella, Parmesan, and provolone.

U.S. dairy farmers, through the producer-funded check-off program, partnered with Dominos to help make the launch possible. "This is just another step in the evolution we started five years ago when we began partnering with companies to promote dairy products," noted Tom Gallagher the chief executive officer for Dairy Management, Inc. "The first partnership started with McDonald's and the single-serve milk offering," Gallagher said. Gallagher reports the current partnerships with Dominos got rolling with a $12 million commitment with DMI. Dominos is expected to match four to five times that level.

When asked if DMI's $12 million made the project possible, Domino’s Brandon said, "It was the stimulus to make it happen," playing off the current economic headlines. Brandon went on to say, he was not willing to say it would never have happened, but, without the partnership, it would have taken much longer to get done.

No doubt, pizza is an important product for the dairy industry . . . 25 percent of all U.S. cheese goes on pizza. "If we were able to add one ounce of cheese to all pizza sold in the U.S., that would equal 250 million pounds of cheese," said Paul Rovey chairman of DMI. (Milk equivalent would be 2.5 billion pounds or 1.4 percent of U.S. milk production.) And anything that can be done to return pizza sales to the level of just a few years ago is a must. In fact, DMI will be holding an emergency pizza task force meeting by bringing together major pizza chains in the next few weeks.

This announcement is no small rollout. Dominos has 9,000 stores in 61 countries across the globe with over 1 million transactions per day. The American Legends product offering is focused on the domestic chains of which Dominos has 5,000 stores. "We (Dominos and DMI) have shared goals, to sell more pizza, and more cheese," says Brandon.