Domino's Pizza, Inc., trading as Domino's, is an American multinational pizza restaurant chain founded in 1960. The corporation is Delaware-domiciled and headquartered at the Domino's Farms office park in Ann Arbor Township near Ann Arbor, Michigan. As of 2018, Domino's had approximately 15,000 stores, with 5,649 in the United States, 1,500 in India, and 1,249 in the United Kingdom. Domino's has stores in more than 83 countries and 5,701 cities worldwide.
History
1960s–1990s In 1960, Tom Monaghan and his brother, Jim, took over the operation of DomiNick's, an existing location of a small pizza restaurant chain that had been owned by Dominick DeVarti, at 507 Cross Street (now 301 West Cross Street)Jim Leonard, Living the Faith: A Life of Tom Monaghan (University of Michigan Press, 2012) pp41-55 in Ypsilanti, Michigan, near Eastern Michigan University. The deal was secured by a $500 down payment, after which the brothers borrowed $900 to pay for the store. The brothers planned to split the work hours evenly, but Jim did not want to quit his job as a full-time postman to keep up with the demands of the new business. Within eight months, Jim traded his half of the business to Tom for the Volkswagen Beetle they used for pizza deliveries.
By 1965, Tom Monaghan had purchased two additional pizzerias; he now had a total of three locations in the same county. Monaghan wanted the stores to share the same branding, but the original owner forbade him from using the DomiNick's name. One day, an employee, Jim Kennedy, returned from a pizza delivery and suggested the name "Domino's". Monaghan immediately loved the idea and officially renamed the business to Domino's Pizza, Inc. in 1965.
The company logo originally had three dots (), representing the three stores in 1965. Monaghan planned to add a new dot with the addition of every new store, but this idea quickly faded, as Domino's experienced rapid growth. Domino's Pizza opened its first franchise location in 1967 and by 1978, the company had expanded to 200 stores. In 1975, Domino's faced a lawsuit by Amstar Corporation, the maker of Domino Sugar, alleging trademark infringement and unfair competition. On May 2, 1980, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans found in favor of Domino's Pizza. During the lawsuit, Domino's opened fifteen new stores under the name Pizza Dispatch, while also converting other stores to the name.
In 1998, after 38 years of ownership, Monaghan announced his retirement, sold 93 percent of the company to Bain Capital, Inc. for about $1 billion, and ceased being involved in day-to-day operations of the company. A year later, the company named Dave Brandon as its CEO.
Leaning Tower of Pizza
The Leaning Tower of Pizza was a proposed 30-story slanted skyscraper that would have housed Domino's Pizza's operations at its Domino's Farms campus near Ann Arbor, Michigan.Madden, Stephen (December 19, 1988). "Pizza Pie in the Sky". CNN. In the mid-1980s, Monaghan asked Taliesin Associated Architects, the inheritors of Frank Lloyd Wright's practice, to erect a structure based on an un-built tower that Wright designed in 1956 for Chicago called the Golden Beacon. Sometime during the planning of the tower, Monaghan and the Taliesin architects parted company, allegedly because both parties felt the project may have not served justice to the spirit of Wright's architecture.
Monaghan then went to Gunnar Birkerts, the architect of Domino's unusual half-mile (800 m) long headquarters office building who came up with a design for a tower that would rise at a 15-degree angle with a swooping top reminiscent of the forms of Wright's late work. Birkerts' design, no doubt, had serious intent, but would immediately and forever be dubbed with the nickname "The Leaning Tower of Pizza" after Italy's Leaning Tower of Pisa. The structure was never built but a tall scale model stands at the proposed site on Domino Pizza headquarters in Ann Arbor Charter Township, Michigan, outside of Ann Arbor.
International expansion On May 12, 1983, Domino's opened its first international store, in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. That same year, Domino's opened its 1,000th store, at 8086 E. Mill Plain Blvd. in Vancouver, Washington. In 1985, the chain opened their first store in the United Kingdom in Luton. Also, in 1985 Domino's opened their first store in Tokyo, Japan. In 1993, they became the second American franchise to open in the Dominican Republic and the first one to open in Haiti, under the direction of entrepreneur Luis de Jesús Rodríguez. By 1995, Domino's had expanded to 1,000 international locations. In 1997, Domino's opened its 1,500th international location, opening seven stores in one day across five continents. By 2014, the company had grown to 6,000 international locations and was planning to expand to pizza's birthplace, Italy; this was achieved on October 5, 2015, in Milan, with their first Italian location. CEO Patrick Doyle, in May 2014, said the company would concentrate on its delivery model there. After having faced tough competition from local restaurants and falling behind on its debt obligations, Domino's exited the country in 2022.
In 1995, Domino's Pizza entered China through the Pizza Vest Fast Food Group, which also owned the rights to operate Domino's Pizza in eleven Southeast Asian countries.
In February 2016, Domino's opened its 1,000th store in India. Outside the United States, India has the largest number of Domino's outlets in the world.
China The Chinese subsidiary is known as Domino's Pizza China (). As of October 2019, Domino's Pizza China has about 250 stores in nine cities: Beijing (about 75 stores), Shanghai (about 100 stores), Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Tianjin, Nanjing, Suzhou, Wuxi, and Hangzhou. Domino's Pizza China has offered American-style potato bacon pizza, crayfish crispy-and-tender chicken pizza, durian pulp pizza, and salted egg-yolk pizza, as well as Sichuan pepper-flavor tender chicken drumsticks.
The first mainland China store was located in the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone 4 and the first Beijing location opened in Haidian District in May 1997. In December 2006, Taiwan's Jinghua Hotel Group invested NT$500 million to acquire the rights for Domino's Pizza in Taiwan and Beijing. The 200th store in Shenzhen, was also the 10,000th Domino's store internationally. In 2017, Dash Brands Ltd., a foreign investment company specializing in restaurant chains, obtained the exclusive rights for Hong Kong and Macau.
In China, more than 90% of orders are placed online. Orders can be made in the stores and on the company website, via app, and through the messaging app WeChat. Despite insisting that its own distribution system has greater advantages in safeguarding service quality and data retention, Domino's has already opened up a model of cooperation with third-party take-out platforms such as Taobao Shangou and Meituan.
2000s–present In 2004, after 44 years as a privately held company, Domino's began trading common stock on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol "DPZ". Industry trade publication Pizza Today magazine named Domino's Pizza "Chain of the Year" in 2003, 2010, and 2011. In a simultaneous celebration in January 2006, Domino's opened its 5,000th American store in Huntley, Illinois, and its 3,000th international store in Panama City, Panama, making 8,000 total stores for the system. In August 2006, the Domino's location in Tallaght, Dublin, Ireland, became the first store in Domino's history to hit a turnover of $3 million (€2.35 million) per year. , Domino's has 8,200-plus stores worldwide, which totaled $1.4 billion in gross income.
In August 2012, Domino's Pizza changed its name to simply Domino's. At the same time, Domino's introduced a new logo that removed the blue rectangle and text under the domino in the logo, and changed the formerly all-red domino to be blue on the side with two dots and red on the side with one dot. This was done because the company wanted to "expand" menu choices rather than simply rely on its traditional pizza.
In April 2022, Domino's Italy franchise operator EPizza SpA filed for bankruptcy at a Milan court after two years of declining sales caused by the COVID-19 lockdowns in Italy. In addition, Domino's Pizza faced competition from local pizza chains and restaurants, which had begun using food delivery app services such as Glovo, Just Eat and Deliveroo. The reason for the failure, however, is mainly that the customer rating of Domino's outlets is very low in Italy, which explains the difficulty of competing with the high quality of Italian pizzas. After the 90-day grace period expired in July 2022, Domino's closed all its Italian stores on 20 July.
In 2023, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Domino's Russian operations also filed for bankruptcy and Domino's ultimately announced their withdrawal from the country, closing down all of their restaurants shortly after the announcement.
On December 12, 2024, Domino's announced that it would transfer its stock to the Nasdaq Global Select Market which took effect on January 2, 2025 at the stock market open. The company retained the ticker symbol "DPZ".
Domino's announced on February 7, 2025, that it plans to close more than 200 stores worldwide, 172 of them just in Japan, where Domino's Pizza Japan operates 1,000 stores. The decision comes after CEO and Managing Director Mark van Dyck took the reins of the company. The reason given for the closure was low sales in the selected stores. Of all the markets that include the brand, Australia–New Zealand was the only market to report positive growth. With the closures, Domino's expects to reduce costs by approximately $9.8 million.
Products
The Domino's menu varies by region. The current Domino's menu in the United States features a variety of Italian-American main and side dishes. Pizza is the primary focus, with traditional, specialty, and custom pizzas available in a variety of crust styles and toppings. In 2011, Domino's launched artisan-style pizzas. Additional entrees include pasta, bread bowls, and oven-baked sandwiches. The menu offers chicken and bread side dishes, as well as beverages and desserts.
From its founding until the early 1990s, the menu at Domino's Pizza was kept simple relative to other fast food restaurants, to ensure efficiency of delivery. Historically, Domino's menu consisted solely of one style of pizza crust in two sizes (12-inch and 16-inch), eleven toppings, and Coca-Cola as the only soft drink option.
The first menu expansion occurred in 1989, with the debut of Domino's deep dish. Its introduction followed market research showing that 40% of pizza customers preferred thick crusts. The new product launch cost approximately $25 million, of which $15 million was spent on new sheet metal pans with perforated bottoms. Domino's started testing extra-large-size pizzas in early 1993, starting with the 30-slice, yard-long "The Dominator".
Domino's tapped into a market trend toward bite-size foods with spicy "Buffalo Chicken Kickers", as an alternative to Buffalo wings, in August 2002. The breaded, baked, white-meat fillets, similar to chicken fingers, are packaged in a custom-designed box with two types of sauce to "heat up" and "cool down" the chicken.