How Domino's Became The World's Biggest Pizza Chain | Big Business | Insider

This used to be the only way to make a Domino's

pizza

—about a dozen workers touched each ball of dough as it rolled down the production line—but now, at Domino's new $50 million facility in Indiana, the Machines measure, move and stack

pizza

dough and more and more workers touch buttons instead of flour, you just have to watch it and make sure it's doing the right things. This all comes after years of tough competition from other pizza

chain

s and a struggle to find enough workers, including at the store in particular, Domino's was struggling. time fulfilling these roles that are not very well paid and quite strenuous to work in and a sales bike for the

biggest

pizza holiday, those machines will be put to the test, all hands on deck.

The Super Bowl is one of the three busiest days for Domino's Pizza, so how does the

world

's largest pizza

chain

balance automation with the human touch and what does it all mean for the future of fast food? Every year Domino's offers around one billion pizzas around the

world

. It has been one of the most successful public companies since about 2009-2010. The company is able to keep pizza cheap because it controls its entire supply chain, from dough manufacturing to delivery in the US. It all depends on the bustling production and distribution centers. In 2018 we filmed at an older facility in Connecticut with a more manual dough process. there it took hours longer to make and cool the pizza dough than at Domino's newer, highly automated Indiana Center.

Now we have robots, so it's more efficient and more consistent. There is a 110,000 square foot location open in October 2022 and it reportedly cost the company $15 million. We are constantly moving from the moment we start, go, go, while some centers still measure ingredients by hand on new, mixing machines, pump and flour, water, oil, salt and sugar directly from storage, then we have a pre-packaged secret recipe. recipe I can't tell you what our top secret ingredient contains because we couldn't let you get out of here. The new facility can produce 50 batches of dough per day, which is equivalent to 88,000 pizzas daily for our customers.

Joe has a shelf life. and we don't freeze it, we have to do it constantly, so the non-stop workers in this new center mainly check the computers, complete samples for quality control and fix any problems with the machines that I don't like to stop, so basically if There is something going on during the day, we need to fix the problems quickly and efficiently and get them going so the line never stops. Workers can program the machine to scoop out different sized dough balls for small and medium. or large pizzas and I just changed that tube to give us a slightly smaller ball and then the robots place the dough balls on trays.

That's another update, since this was done by hand nine years ago, there were team members that were putting that in. So imagine how difficult it was for our team members. This has made it much less physical and we are able to attract much more talent. A set of chambers make sure the dough balls don't stick. It is literally taking micro type photographs. If you find any errors in placing this right here, it will reject your tension. This machine applies a label to each tray to identify what type of dough it was and when it was made.

Note the spiral cooler. Approximately 3,000 feet of conveyor belts can cool 40,000 trays of dough at a time. There is no cooler larger than the one you see behind me. We can support two days of production and that gives us the ability to have dough in case we need to support Other centers in the supply chain don't want to freeze it because then it would prevent the dough from fermenting or rising, which happens when the yeast activates, so they cool it to 38 degrees to slow down the fermentation process. It's very cold here in our trays. They go up for 30 minutes and go down for 30 minutes the dough used to take four hours to cool now with the spiral cooler you only need one the dough balls go down another conveyor belt then the sensors tell these robots to take them out 25 trays High The process is much faster than the original way of doing it.

The machine also slides a cart under each stack to move them easily. This is the end of the line. We double check that each one activates a tag. Then you push it. There are six different types of dough. Handmade extra large, large, medium, small and wheat pan for school lunches, they wait for orders from franchises and have to move fast to prepare for the

biggest

pizza party, the Super Bowl, we typically see a 30 percent increase cent, so we normally go from producing half a million. dumplings at 750,000 Lobos per week Noe says with all this automation the center was able to reduce hours of dough making and this production process requires fewer employees, an important feature of the new facility because less than a year into the pandemic the

domino

es arrived.

Facing a labor crisis affecting the entire food industry, as of early 2021, the US restaurant industry had lost 1.2 million workers and there were many reasons why some workers retired, some quit, some trained for jobs in other sectors and some relied on employees for unemployment benefits. I left warehouse and delivery jobs at record prices. Domino in particular was having a difficult time filling these roles which are not very high, with salaries quite grueling for the job. Warehouse conditions can be difficult in the summer. This dry, dry area of ​​the warehouse can get very hot. fans and we have other things to keep people cool and hydrated, but it can get very hot, that's where they keep the pizza sauce, the dipping cups, the barbecue sauce, the pizza boxes and the world's most controversial dressing , the pineapple for all those pineapple pizza lovers, the only area we have.

What we're looking at here is our freezer, which is below freezing. This freezer stores cheese, all meat toppings, and chicken wings. The vegetable freezer holds just the mushrooms, onions, and peppers, and a cooler stores the pepperoni. Staffing has been a real challenge again. throughout the industry, so it's kind of a vicious cycle when you can't hire enough people, it creates a lot of different problems throughout the company, so here in Indiana, Domino's implemented new processes to make warehouse and delivery jobs easier to employees in older centers. They would be loaded in bulk onto trucks, so when the drivers arrived at the franchises they had a mini grocery store and picked at the ingredients from each store, but at the new centers Domino's has added a full pick-up team that takes all the ingredients and They load them in cages in each store.

It has its own cage, which is simply efficient, faster and easier. The wheels on these carts make it very smooth to get in and out, so when drivers arrive, pre-selected loads are waiting for them overseas. This is where we organize all of our products for the loading workers they move all of the roll cages and dough dollies into 48 foot refrigerated trucks that we go in and place the cards from left to right right on the truck, we tie them up every five approximately rows to give it a support to hold everything firmly in case it is very tied, it is very useful to take the pizza, on average 13 product stores fit in a single truck we do many things that are like Tetris here in the center it ships around of 28 trailers, they supply more than 300 stores in five states.

Domino's wanted the new center to ease the burden on older supply chain centers. All of these centers were over capacity. Most drivers are dispatched at night to avoid traffic and crowded parking lots. Actually, we just met. the center we go to one of the franchise stores we are going to deliver it uh my wife laughs at me every time because when I go to parallel park my car she asks me why you raise it so much. I say because I drive. the truck more and I drive my car and I also have a small car so you can imagine how many white turns I'm doing in my little car engine virus Did it get that bad?

Domino's launched a program to send employees from Everywhere else in the company to driving school we are arriving now there is a storage right here on the left side. It has a store number, the stop number, so it's very easy to know which store is getting wet, so these are dope trains that we take. the old ones bring the new so it's just a cycle the new picking and caging systems I've taken some of the physical stress off the truckers now everything is pre-sorted so they've really made our job uh 100 easier better and safer Plus , our punctuality has improved a lot in terms of delays, we were only 15 minutes less than an hour, so it was worth all of Domino's investment in new technology.

Fast food correspondent Kate Taylor says yes, it's sort of working. Of these solutions they found are working quite well and at this point the labor shortage is a bit complicit and Domino's has held on to its title of the largest pizza chain in the world; has almost doubled its number of global stores in the last decade. and surpassed Pizza Hut in sales in 2018. Domino's was basically a list of deals for a group of Pizza Hut customers, but what does all this automation mean for the future of human jobs in fast food? Automation is no longer an if, it's a when for fast food.

There is definitely money to be made using robots instead of humans and Domino's is not alone. White Castle already uses robots in some frying stations, and Jack in the Box will soon follow. Robots are appearing in some KFCs and are ready to start cooking chicken and McDonald's. is testing artificial intelligence to receive drive-thru orders. Domino's itself has tested self-driving cars to deliver pizza. If there is a robot that can do something for a cheaper price than hiring people to do it, companies will jump on it, leading to the long-standing concern that robots could take people's jobs.

Personally, I don't think automation is an evil. I think it's a little more nuanced than that. Kate says some of the lost jobs are actually okay with missing stacked boxes over and over again. lead to injuries automate jobs that are repetitive that are dangerous for workers that are even just boring that allow people to have the opportunity to have better jobs in a company and I think that's also something that shouldn't be villainized what doesn't has been going robotic is the Domino's in-store experience, you can't automate everything, keep pizza human, the company has that handmade slogan to live up to the pizza chefs pulled a sturdy dough out of the refrigerator and still make each cake by hand.

Let's start with some fresh dough, take it out and stick it into the corn flour. Make sure you make a pencil. The room reduces air and mass. Jessica spreads a thin layer of tomato sauce. Then you move on to the cheese. phase where she wants to make sure she stays away from The Middle in equal amounts, she puts out about 40 slices of pepperoni for a large pizza, it goes through the oven, it takes about six and a half minutes and then it comes out. On the other hand, a drizzle of garlic oil on the crust finishes the pie and then you close the box and it's all complete, but just because there aren't robots tossing pizza doesn't mean there isn't a Hustle Ready Set Go.

Good job Jessica, it's important to go fast, I think, for the customer aspect, because when they place an order, they're hungry. You know, every pizza is fast. The fastest pizza I've ever made is a large pepperoni in 25 seconds. All hands on deck, super thug It's one of the three busiest days for Domino's Pizza and before you ask, 59 of the customers are ordering pepperoni and stores like this haven't been spared the worst of the labor crisis. challenges with staff strain, there is competition from, you know, all those other delivery companies who want to get our drivers to the end of the process, the hot pies finally go out for delivery today, still by humans and fleets of electric cars , but maybe tomorrow in the driverless we're going to continue transporting the product to our customers and we'll do it next week, it could change, it's anything that has jalapenos in it, uh, simple Jade.

I like pepperoni sausage, yes, I'll put triple pineapple on my pizza. I love it, I mean. Hey, look, I mean, you could say I'm not lying.