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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Pizza delivery

Domino’s and Chevrolet Team Up for In-Car Ordering

Pizza had a big week, in no small part thanks to new developments from Domino’s that are all about finding new ways to get the pie to your front door faster.

The Ann Arbor, MI-based company announced at the beginning of the week that it had partnered with autonomous car company Nuro to test pizza delivery via self-driving vehicles.

The Nuro pilot is currently limited to Houston, TX, at the moment. But anyone in the U.S. with a connected Chevrolet vehicle can take advantage of Domino’s other big news news, which is that the chain is now available for order through Chevy’s in-car Marketplace system.

Marketplace is part of Chevy’s in-vehicle commerce platform that lets users order food, make hotel reservations, and even pay for fuel right from the car’s dashboard. It works independent of users’ smartphones, though anyone wanting to order Domino’s through the system will first need to set up a profile online or through the mobile Domino’s app. Once the user has set up their preferred delivery address, payment information, as well as pie preferences, they can link their Domino’s profile directly to Chevy’s in-car system and order pizza straight from the latter, whose touchscreen interface sits in the dashboard of the car.

Domino’s is the first pizza chain available through Marketplace, which also makes it the first pizza chain you can order with from the car without picking up your smartphone.

The move follows Domino’s announcement from March that it had partnered with Xevo, who makes the in-vehicle commerce technology that powers systems from Chevrolet, GMC, and others. Domino’s has said it wants to have its in-car ordering capabilities on 1 million vehicles by the end of 2019. Joining Chevrolet’s marketplace will be another step towards realizing that goal.

Zume Brings Its Robot and Data-Driven Pizza Delivery to the East Bay Area

Zume Pizza, which uses a combination of robots, predictive analytics and mobile ovens to deliver pizza, further expanding its operations by heading into the East Bay of San Francisco’s Bay Area. According to Eater (and Zume’s service area map), Zume is now delivering pizza to areas around Dublin, Pleasanton and Livermore.

While Zume’s pizza robots garner most of the attention, the company’s bigger play is around data. It hoovers up tons of data points — weather, sporting events, school schedules, etc. — to determine exactly how many and what types of pizzas it will sell in a given evening. From there, Zume parbakes pizzas (with robots!) at a central facility, adds toppings. Pizzas are then loaded and stored in vans with ovens where they finish cooking on the way to a delivery. UPDATE: Zume, as noted below, has been pretty quiet lately, and called to tell us that they have updated their delivery model. Instead of baking pizza on the way to a delivery, they park mobile kitchens in different location and have delivery drivers pick up pies from those. Additionally, the company is now using DoorDash for some of its deliveries.

Up until recently, Zume had only serviced neighborhoods in the South Bay, from San Jose to San Mateo, so the expansion into the Dublin/Pleasanton area is the company’s first move into the East Bay. Zume’s president, Rhonda Woolf told Eater, “We are trying to expand in a way that makes sense for our commissary. This is further than our trucks have historically traveled, so we’re putting a toe in the water to see how that works operationally, working through how to open a central kitchen.”

Zume’s been quiet since it got a $375 million investment from Softbank in November of last year. The company als opened up its data analysis and AI platform to form consultancy that helps other restaurants replicate the Zume model for different types of cuisines. The company even enlisted the help of Welbilt to develop different types of mobile cooking vehicles.

Pizza is a hotbed (pardon the pun) of innovation. Domino’s will let you order pizza from your car, Little Caesars has its Pizza Portal for faster pickup, and Pizza Hut is employing FedEx robots for delivery.

If you want to see how technology like robots are changing the pizza game, get one of the very last tickets still left for our ArticulATE food automation summit happening next week in San Francisco.

You’ll Soon Be Able to Order Domino’s Pizza From Your Car

Domino’s announced this morning it will launch its Anyware digital-ordering platform in cars in 2019. To do so, the pizza chain-turned-tech trailblazer has teamed up with Xevo, whose in-vehicle commerce technology is currently in about 25 million cars.

This is actually not the first time the Anyware platform has made its way into a car. In 2014, Domino’s worked with Ford Motors to bring voice order to the Ford Sync vehicle. That initiative was slurped up into Anyware when the latter launched in 2015 and is still available today.

With the new in-car app, customers use the car’s touchscreen to find their local store, order, and track the pizza. Voice-ordering will also be available. According to a press release, the feature will be automatically loaded onto cars with Xevo platform starting “in late 2019.” While the release didn’t state which car brands this includes, Xevo already works with Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, and GMC, so I’d expect models from those companies to be on the list. Xevo also partnered with Hyundai in 2018 to allow customers to order and pay for meals from Applebee’s, so this isn’t its first go at a QSR partnership.

For Domino’s, the Xevo partnership seems like another stop on Domino’s quest to seemingly try out every new technology it possibly can for delivering pizzas. The list of channels from which Domino’s customer can use the Anyware platform keeps growing: phones, smart watches, TVs, Alexa and Google Home devices, Slack, Facebook Messenger, and Domino’s own Zero Click app. The chain also delivers to HotSpots, which are “non-traditional” locations like beaches, parks, and probably even the zoo. And Domino’s launched a separate partnership with global addressing platform what3words earlier this year, to use the latter’s technology in countries and regions that lack a more straightforward address system.

At one point, Domino’s was the only pizza chain around trying out new technologies left and right, but times have changed. Pizza Hut recently partnered with FedEx to use its autonomous bot to deliver pizzas, and even has some weirder projects in the works, like the autonomous pizza factory on wheels the company unveiled in 2018. (It’s still a prototype.) Papa John’s, who has weathered a good deal of trouble in the last year, got a $200 million investment in February. The company hasn’t said yet what the money will go towards, but if it wants to keep up, a little tech innovation will probably be part of its plans.

The only bummer about the Domino’s-Xevo deal is that you still have to either pick the pizza up at a store or get home by the time the pie arrives. My guess is that will change quickly, and Domino’s will either integrate its HotSpots into car ordering or even use the what3words’ tech. You have to figure that, with its many tech initiatives and a platform called Anyware, Domino’s is aiming to eventually deliver everywhere.

How Should Papa John’s Spend Its New $200M Investment?

This morning Papa John’s announced a $200 million investment from hedge fund company Starboard Value. The company has also named Starboard Value CEO Jeffery Smith as Papa John’s new chairman. The investment is a bright spot after a well-documented year in hell for the struggling pizza company, including a drop in shares earlier this month after talks with other potential investors fell apart. And while a $200 million shot in the arm won’t single-handedly fix Papa John’s reputation, it could help the company once again compete more seriously with the likes of Pizza Hut and Domino’s.

A press release stated that half the $200 million investment will go towards repaying debt, and the remainder will be “providing financial flexibility that enables Papa John’s to invest capital to further advance its five strategic priorities.” Technology is one of them, and it should play big role in how Papa John’s allocates the new funds.

Since the chain’s struggles began around July 2012, other companies have released several noteworthy tech innovations that are changing the way they deliver pizza.

Some highlights are:

Pizza Hut took over as the official sponsor of the NFL. That’s not a tech development in and of itself, but it has allowed the Plano, TX-based company to push its digital rewards program to more people and try out new ways for customers to interact with the app. Pizza Hut also unveiled an autonomous pizza-making machine it’s calling a “mobile pizza factory” manned by a robotic arm that makes pizzas as a human drives to the delivery address.

Domino’s had already rolled out its Hotspots prior to the start of the Papa John’s saga. The company has since furthered its efforts in location-based technology by expanding its what3words partnership to the Middle East, which alleviates some of the friction and delays involved with delivering to regions with irregular and/or non-existent street address systems. The company also added an AI-powered loyalty campaign in 2018.

Even Little Caesar’s, who does not and may never deliver, has been hard at work on pizza innovation with the Pizza Portal, a self-service pickup station for mobile customers, and has a patent for a pizza-making robot.

Papa John’s hasn’t exactly been sitting around doing nothing. The company did revamp its rewards program at the end of 2018, making it easier and faster for customers to earn points and therefore free food. The move, however, seemed more a reaction to falling sales than a push for digital innovation.

That said, Papa John’s should continue to invest in its mobile ordering and rewards platform, fine-tuning the tech to make it as quick and effortless as possible for customers to order. CEO Steve Richie has stated in the past that millennials and Gen Z are an important audience to reach with new initiatives, so any revamping or new developments for mobile order should bear that in mind.

Drive-thru is another area Papa John’s could invest more in and differentiate itself. Dunkin’ set a standard last year with its tech-driven drive-thru, which offered a dedicated lane for pickup orders. Papa John’s could give its mobile rewards program a boost and get on the edge of a growing trend by incorporating a similar strategy at stores that have drive-thrus, and possibly even consider building more drive-thrus where space permits.

If space doesn’t permit (like the hole-in-the-wall location up the block here in Brooklyn), pizza lockers could do the trick. Imagine ordering and paying for a pizza via mobile app on your way home from work, swinging by Papa John’s after you climb out of the subway, and picking up a hot pie from a designated locker. I could see this working in a mega metropolis or even in the airport, where grabbing a slice you paid for on your app would be the fastest way to eat en route to a connecting flight.

Where do you think Papa John’s should spend its investment cash? Drop your thoughts into the comments below.

Domino’s Just Made It Even Easier to Deliver Pizza — in Saudi Arabia

If you order Domino’s pizza, your days of relaying special delivery instructions to the driver could soon be over. The pizza chain-turned tech company just announced via a press release it has expanded its partnership with location-technology company what3words to Saudi Arabia.

Domino’s has already been delivering to geographic locations called Hotspots like parks and street corners. The partnership with what3words is a separate initiative (that doesn’t power the Hotspots), and brings a new level of precision to location services and food delivery.

What3words is a global addressing platform that divides the entire world up into a grid of 3m x 3m squares. Its algorithm converts GPS coordinates (the squares) into unique three-word addresses. For example, I typed in an old address of mine and got “fuzzy.data.news.” When I moved the map a few squares over, to be on the street outside, the address became “august.cones.wanted.” According to what3words’ site, every single 3×3 square on earth has a unique three-word name. The algorithm determines the words, so it’s not like a password where companies tell you to choose something you’ll be able to quickly remember. But I doubt I’ll be forgetting “august.cones.wanted” anytime soon.

Saudi Arabia makes sense as a testing ground for this partnership: home and street addresses have historically not been used there. The what3words app instead lets a driver locate the customer’s home by locating the three-word address on a map. This only applies to orders placed over the phone; it’s as-yet not applicable to the Domino’s app.

Domino’s already uses the technology in Sint Maarten, a Caribbean island with notoriously bad traffic and an equally confusing system for house addresses. Previously, Domino’s delivery drivers had to call the customer and ask for turn-by-turn instructions that used mango trees as landmarks.

On the upside, this kind of technology saves both driver and customer time. More time spent looking for an address means fewer deliveries, (h)angrier customers and, for the driver, less money in tips at the end of the day. And for the customer, it broadens the options in terms of where you can get a pizza delivered (park, beach, abandoned warehouse).

Saudi Arabia’s been using what3words for businesses, logistics, and taxis since last year. And what3words is also in London, with courier service Quiqup, and Mercedes-Benz built an in-car navigation system using the technology.

Stateside, Domino’s dropped another announcement on Wednesday: It will track how much pizza you eat and reward you for eating more. And it’s not just Domino’s pizza, it’s all pizza, including those from competitors. Customers download the latest Domino’s app and scan their pizza. Each scan earns 10 points; when a customer reaches 60 points, they get a free medium-sized pizza from Domino’s.

The program, which starts February 2, is an obvious ploy to sell pizzas during the Super Bowl (and collect more data on user preferences and behaviors).

Meanwhile, it seems like only a matter of time before Domino’s brings it what3words partnership to the U.S.