Okay New Yorkers and Chicagoans. With all of the pizza joints in your home cities making "authentic" pizza, do the pizza chains like Dominoes modify their usual cardbaord offerings for ya'lls more discriminating palates?
Domino's reinvents its pizza
Company spices up crust, sauce to adapt to changing tastes
Jaclyn Trop / The Detroit News
On the eve of its 50th birthday, Domino's pizza is sweeter, spicier and bolder than ever before.
After expanding its menu to include oven-baked sandwiches, Breadbowl Pasta and Chocolate Lava Crunch cake, Ann Arbor-based Domino's is returning to its roots to honor its golden anniversary in 2010. The country's largest pizza delivery company has reinvented its traditional pie, increasing its flavor, after two years in research and development.
The new pizza, available only in the U.S., has been re-engineered to appeal to the changing American palate, said spokesman Tim McIntyre. A new garlic-seasoned crust topped with a mix of mozzarella and provolone is held together by a nuanced red pepper-infused sauce that tastes sweet at first but concludes with a kick, the company said.
"People are looking for bolder flavors, more robust and spicier," McIntyre said. "Everything is fuller and more flavorful."
The pizza was rolled out in stores nationwide Sunday. A national campaign, centered around a front-page banner ad on YouTube, kicked off Monday.
The pizza maker, which reported third-quarter sales of $1.2 billion, spent about $75 million on development and marketing of the new pizza, according to an estimate by Forbes magazine.
"We've been known for being number one in service and delivery, and product quality has been second," McIntyre said.
The pizza is a response to the "Domino's 'haters' of the world, who don't hesitate to bash us on blogs and in social media sites everywhere," he said.
The four-minute YouTube video, titled "The Pizza Turnaround: The true story of how Domino's listened to its harshest critics and made their best pizza ever,"
confronts criticism from focus groups and Internet users, including allegations that Domino's pizza is bland and tastes like cardboard.
"You can either use negative comments to get you down or you can use them to excite you and energize your process of making a better pizza," President Patrick Doyle said in the video.
The recipe overhaul is overdue, said Mark Lantz, a Birmingham-based brand strategy consultant.
"The pizza category has changed dramatically since Domino's made its name on the back of a 30-minute delivery guarantee, but has Domino's as a brand changed much in that same interval? Probably not."
