Domino’s Bolts To Future Of Pizza Delivery By Deal Harnessing 800 EVs

Domino’s has used all sorts of technologies to pull itself to the top of the global pizza business over the last decade or so, and now it is banking on another tech-based gambit to continue the climb: all-electric delivery vehicles.

The largest pizza company in the world has begun taking delivery of more than 100 custom-branded Chevrolet Bolt EVs at select franchise and corporate stores throughout the United States, with an additional 700 rolling out in the coming months, making it the largest electric pizza-delivery fleet in the country.

“There’s interest in ordering even more by our franchisees, because the combination of availability and the total cost of vehicle ownership is important,” Domino’s Pizza CEO Russell Weiner told me. “Another key part of this is our partnership with Enterprise Fleet Management, which is going to maintain the vehicles.”

The Bolt deal also is Domino’s biggest gambit yet in moving away from its traditional model of employing delivery people who drive their own cars. “Over time, all costs are increasing, so the difference between having these vehicles and our traditional model is closing,” Weiner explained.

“We also saw the opportunity to make positive change, to put EVs on the road to deliver great pizza and delivering it in a better way every day. We deliver three million pizzas every day around the planet.” Overall, the Bolts will offer the advantages of ample battery life while avoiding the financial impact of high gas prices.

(Apropos of its overall sustainability goals, Domino’s also released its 2022 Stewardship Report, which showed great progress toward fulfilling what Weiner called a commitment “to establish a long-term sustainable business, where the environment can thrive as our business grows.)

Domino’s decision in regard to Bolt is an extension of an overall corporate focus on delivery since founder Tom Monaghan launched Domino’s with a Volkswagen Beetle in 1960 in Ann Arbor, Michigan; the company still has that car. Domino’s grew over the subsequent half-century in large part through a delivery emphasis that, for decades, included the promise of coming through with steaming pies within a half-hour from its pizza-making locations.

“What happened as our business developed over time is that, in a majority of cases in the United States, the most efficient way to deliver for both our company and our franchisees was to hire people who wanted to drive who had their own vehicles,” Weiner recalled. “We would pay normal wages and reimburse them fore their mileage. That had been really the only way that us and all the other pizza companies would do it.

“There were pockets of company vehicles and franchise-owned vehicles. But people would drive it the way they would drive a rental car, and because of the costs, these vehicles didn’t make a lot of sense. When people have their own car, they always tend to drive it with a bit more care.”

At the same time, Weiner said, “The pool of folks available for driving is very competitive right now.” The lack of delivery drivers even has constrained Domino’s business to some degree during and since the pandemic as demand for delivery has risen. The fact that the entire fast-food industry has faced the same problem has given rise to delivery aggregators, such as Doordash, which many quick-serve restaurant companies use. But Domino’s has held on to providing its own delivery service as a competitive differentiator.

The chain’s approach to delivery has continued to reflect a proprietary emphasis on technology that also propelled Domino’s to the top of the online-ordering business through various apps that helped it become the No. 1 pizza chain in the U.S. and around the world as of a few years ago. In the case of delivery, for instance, Domino’s has experimented with autonomous vehicles and, in 2015, rolled out a custom-built pizza-delivery vehicle called DXP. DXP was a Chevrolet Spark subcompact car, repurposed with customized warming ovens in back and special stowage for two-liter soda bottles, among other features.

“We ended up with about 150 of those on the road,” Weiner said. Some reports said the company wanted to field thousands of DXPs initially. In any event, “We needed to professionalize how we deliver,” he said, “and DXP was another important step.” Domino’s also is already delivering pizza in 24 international markets with electric bikes and scooters, whose drivers are toting “a heat-wave bag that keeps the product really hot.”

With the addition of the hundreds of Bolts, many of which will be owned by major Domino’s multi-unit franchisees with store concentrations in specific cities, Weiner said, “We will kind of be able to fish from two pools for drivers. One is our traditional driver who have their own cars and want to drive; but that’s where everyone else is competing [for drivers].

“For the other pool, a big pool, think of all the people who have driver’s licenses but don’t have a vehicle, or don’t want to drive their own vehicle. There are many people in our stores who have driver’s licenses but aren’t delivery drivers. The new Bolts will let us procure and hire people from this different pool, and in a pinch, we can take another insider from the restaurant and deliver with that vehicle.”