How to reinvent franchising with tech and transparency

The world is getting smaller. I came to New York and met Michael Lastoria, the founder of the &pizza chain. He treated me to honey pizza, showed me how their kitchen worked, and how their special bot talked to every guest differently. &pizza is a really iconic fast casual pizza chain on the East Coast. In business, Michael believes in design, values, and culture, and doesn’t want to sell his franchise because he doesn’t believe in typical American franchisees who believe only in money. He calls his team The Tribe. He and I have found a lot in common. Even the age of our companies is similar; Dodo Pizza came to being in 2011, &pizza, in 2012; they, in Washington, and we, in Syktyvkar 🙂 #pizzabrothers

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This week, a historical moment happened for our company. We launched our mobile app in Kazakhstan. However, that’s not the big news. The big news is, we’ve created the first multinational app in global pizza industry history. It works like Uber. Arriving to a new country, you don’t install a local Uber app. You use one app everywhere. But usually, it’s not the same with pizza apps—you have to download a local one every time you’re in a new country. Our app will work in every country where Dodo Pizza is located, you just have to choose the country in the app menu. So far, there are only two countries there, Russia and Kazakhstan, but we’ll add Romania, Belarus, Lithuania, Estonia, Slovenia, the UK, USA, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and of course, China, soon.

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In autumn, we announced we were going to expand our IT team from 49 to 250 developers. And immediately we were buried under an avalanche of questions—mostly, people were interested why a pizza chain needs so many software engineers. How did we come up with such a number? So now I want to answer that.

As you may know, Dodo Pizza is a franchise. Currently, we have more than 450 pizzerias in 12 countries, including the USA, UK, and China. The core of our franchise is Dodo IS, our information system that controls most of the business processes...

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This is a translation in English of an article about Dodo Pizza written by Benjamin Bidder and published in Germany on January 28th, 2019 by one of the country’s most established magazines: Der Spiegel. Though this piece doesn’t necessarily represent our point of view, we share it as it is, without any alterations.

Source: Diese Russen wollen Deutschland erobern - mit Pizza

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What unites an ex-investment banker from Merrill Lynch, some top Russian programmers formerly employed by Intel and a marketing expert from Poland? They’ve joined forces in a start-up office on the outskirts of Moscow—and they’re making pizza....

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We’ve closed two of our pizzerias. In business, sometimes it’s important to cut your losses, draw necessary conclusions, and move on. So we’ve closed our small “Dodo Pizza and Coffee” pizzeria in Syktyvkar.

The idea was beautiful, but ultimately, this experiment hadn’t become profitable. Nonetheless, we should thank it for the accumulated experience. Technologies and design created for this project are the central elements of our format. We’ve created new interior design for this pizzeria, as well as our “pizza slices” product that is timer prepared and priced flexibly (it sells at a discount after 45 minutes; after 60, it is written off).

Also, Mikhail Kropanev, our partner in China, has closed our first Hangzhou pizzeria. It was located at a distance from the main thoroughfares. Unlike our pizzeria in Yantai and despite all our efforts, the Hangzhou pizzeria at that location and in that format couldn’t become profitable. Mikhail doesn’t plan to leave the business altogether and intends to open a new pizzeria.

We’re working on our first corporate pizzeria in Hangzhou. This will be a pizzeria in a completely new format, and a brave attempt to break into the Chinese market. What’s that all about? Check out our earlier posts.

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