Domino's Pizza sales soar with new recipe

Domino's is a friend of ours. Last year, the well-known delivery pizza chain launched and heavily promoted (with some help from the check-off) their American Legends pizza line which came with 30 percent more cheese. This year, the chain took an honest look at its longtime recipe for making pizzas and decided to do a revamp. They even publicized real comments from customers that compared their crust to cardboard and sauce to ketchup. Domino's new reformulated pizza included a re-do of the crust, sauce, and even cheese. The pizzas now come with 100 percent real mozzarella cheese flavored with just a hint of provolone . The sauce is kicked up with spicy red pepper, and the crust has a new garlic butter flavor. Jim Montel, Vice President of Strategic Partnerships at DMI says that the new pizza utilizes 50 percent more cheese than the previous recipe.

Just this morning, USA Today is reporting a "historic leap" in sales for Domino's. In just four months, sales climbed 14.3 percent. The company's CEO J. Patrick Doyle says that jump ranks as one of the largest quarterly same-store sales jumps ever recorded by a fast-food chain — all this at a time when the pizza delivery business is taking a 3 percent hit from the recent recession. An impressive 28 percent of all cheese is consumed on pizza, and 43 percent of milk is used to make cheese. We're hoping this jump in sales equates to more cheese consumption — it should. From the sales end, Montel reports that after discussing with one of the country's major pizza cheese suppliers, in the fourth quarter of 2009, sales were up a remarkable 48 percent.

Cheese substitute news caused a stir

Always, there’s lots of excitement at World Dairy Expo, and this year was no exception. However, there were some downers. Certainly, the past months of losses affected the attitudes of the dairy farmers attending the show. One aggravation was the group of ill-informed PETA activists who demonstrated at the entrance to the Expo grounds.

There also was grousing about a product designed to replace cheese in pizza. Word of that untimely news spread through the Expo grounds like flu through a middle school. It gave us all something else to worry about at a trying time for our industry.

Turns out, it was the “Texturing Solutions” division of Cargill in Belgium that had made the announcement in mid-September. That group has come up with a chemical concoction (there’s no other way to put it) that “replicates the functionally of dairy protein . . . at an outstanding cost advantage." The press release claimed the product (Lygomme) would cost a pizza maker 60 percent less than imitation cheese (15 percent dairy protein) and 200 percent less than real cheese. Just what we need, right?

One Hoard’s booth at Expo is across the aisle from Cargill Animal Nutrition. We felt sorry for our friends there, who had to have heard a lot of complaints about this new product developed by a different division of the giant company half a world away. They pointed out to us (and anyone else who would listen) that the new product is for the European market only at this point and that, in part, it is aimed at consumers with allergies to dairy proteins or are lactose intolerant.

We noted that in Europe the product appears to be positioned for the frozen pizza market. That perhaps gives a clue about its taste and mouth feel (or lack of it) on a fresh pizza. Plus, in a world paying more attention to the quality and source of its food, chemical cocktails such as that new replacement for cheese are going to hold less and less appeal.

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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.