How to reinvent franchising with tech and transparency

How many pizza shops, operated by one brand, can a country accommodate? In the UK, this number is just over 1,000. In Russia, Dodo Pizza’s home market, it will probably be close to 1,500. In China? Much more than that even.While many people still see China as a place that produces all the stuff that the rest of the world consumes, its huge internal market is developing rapidly. And that is the reason why Dodo Pizza founder, Fyodor Ovchinnikov, has chosen China as our primary market for the future—along with the UK.

Having built a market-leader in Eastern Europe...

The dark kitchen is a very popular idea nowadays—it’s getting a lot of investment hype. Dark kitchens are restaurants without a dining area, they do delivery only. Their rent is low, their kitchens combine several concepts at once, and their storage areas and courier service are shared between them. All this should result in cost savings and increased efficiency.

This year, I visited CloudKitchens in Los Angeles, one of Uber founder Travis Kalanick’s new ventures. In a low-rent neighborhood near the downtown business district, several concepts are gathered under one roof—pizza, Tex-Mex,...

At the end of 2018, the founder of Dodo Pizza, Fyodor Ovchinnikov, set a new Big Hairy Audacious Goal for our team: to grow the number of Dodo pizzerias in Europe, the US, and China from 16 to 200 by the end of 2021.

At the time, the franchise already had more than 400 units up and running, but most of them were located in Russia. To achieve this new goal, our team had to find a way to grow the brand globally as fast as it had been growing in Eastern Europe.

The capacity of our home market...

Quite a few entrepreneurs I respect don’t believe in franchising. They say it isn't a decent way to grow a business. And although we at Dodo Pizza are building a franchise, I can relate to that sentiment.

Old-school franchising’s sins are numerous indeed. They range from inconsistency in quality and service to a lack of trust between partners that can border on open hostility.

We at Dodo dare to say we can change this. Our team aims to build not only a digital-first pizza franchise, but a franchise of a new kind altogether.

If you know how legacy brands operate, some of...