Domino's Pizza

Italian Originals Meatsa Trio Pizza

When people think of pizza, what is their very first thought? Most people's first thought probably would be Italy. Domino's Pizza thought the pizza-Italian connection is a lot stronger than we realize, and they were right.

For the worldwide pizza chain, the Italian connection is embodied in its Italian Originals line of pizzas. The first out of the oven was Meatsa Trio, which earned a MenuMasters Award for Best Menu/Line Extension.

Heading up the Italian Originals project is Al Rose, director of product development. He began the research more than two years ago on the test that eventually produced Meatsa Trio. To capture the flavor of Italy, Rose constructed a pizza with original Italian ingredients, such as Parma prosciutto from Parma, Italy. "I made a pizza with $20-a-pound ingredients on it," he says. "From there I worked back to see what we could develop in the U.S. that would match that Italian pizza."

Adjustments were needed. "In Parma they probably make 10,000 pounds of prosciutto a year, and it has to age," he says. "We use over a million pounds of it in a very short time period, so obviously we couldn't use the real thing. We had to match it."

After much matching and testing, Meatsa Trio was launched on Nov. 15. David Brandon, Domino's chairman and chief executive officer, was enthusiastic: "The upscale ingredients and creative topping combinations give pizza lovers an entirely new pizza eating experience," he explains.

Customers agreed. Domino's Pizza devoted its entire fourth-quarter 1999 advertising budget to Meatsa Trio, and some of the chain's quarterly success -- a continued increase in same-store sales and a 30.1-percent earnings increase over 1998 -- can be traced to the new product.

As the name suggests, Meatsa Trio featured a combination of three meats; prosciutto ham, Italian sausage and pepperoni, with a blend of Asiago and mozzarella cheeses and herbs and spices on the dough.

When asked why Meatsa Trio is unique, Rose waxes philosophical: "It goes back to the roots not just of pizza but of civilization," he explains. "Humans grew up around fermented foods. They had to [preserve] in order to survive. Food spoils, but fermented foods last a lot longer. So what they had was bread, cheese, some types of meat and fermented drinks like beer and wine.

"From the start pizza had dough and cheese, and most every culture in the world has some sort of dough and cheese. When you put something on there like prosciutto, which is aged meat, you're not tricking anyone with frou-frou stuff. It's all real, and people like it."

What really worked for Domino's, says Rose, were the flavors in the dough with Asiago cheese and six different herbs and spices on top. "If I can borrow a phrase from chef Emeril Lagasse, it's 'bam in your mouth.'"

"Wham-bam" is a good description of the way Domino's, the pioneer in pizza home delivery, makes and delivers its pizzas in short order. But perception and reality often differ.

"We deliver so quickly that people think everything is frozen, but, in fact, it's all done by hand except for a small line of precooked pizzas, not the Meatsa Trio," Rose explains. "We use fresh dough and hand press it. Almost all pizzas have sauce, cheese, and toppings put on by hand."

To develop the Meatsa Trio, the company tested up to 35 different pizzas with various toppings and cheeses. Rose and four others in product development worked out of a test kitchen at company headquarters in Ann Arbor, Mich.

Changes inevitably occur in a product when it goes from the sanity of the test kitchen to the whirlwind of activity found in Domino's nearly 6,400 stores. Rose points out that "the prosciutto came to the store pre-sliced by the supplier and lost every bit of the real Italian feel. Consumers told us that."

The solution was to hand-tear the prosciutto for every Meatsa Trio pizza that went out the door. "Imagine how many millions of slices had to be hand-torn to do that?" he asks. "You couldn't do it uniformly, which, of course, was part of the cache; it was handmade."

As with any company the size of Domino's Pizza, operations are closely regimented. "When you tell a busy store that it has to hand-tear every prosciutto, there's little push back -- 'Oh, I can't do that' -- so the training is very rigorous," Rose says.

As the first of the Italian Originals, Meatsa Trio was offered until mid-February. The grilled chicken pizza now is offered. "The idea was always to launch Meatsa Trio and bring another pizza behind it like the chicken," Rose says. "We're building the line one step at a time."

"This was a huge undertaking and very fulfilling," Rose says. "We don’t spend time working on 70 different things in hopes that three rise to the top. We focus our time and energy on a few things we know we're going to do. No one's working on a competing project. We all work together."

Rose has been cooking in one store or another since he was 16. He holds a master's degree in food science from Michigan State University. As a passionate observer of the foodservice industry, he's thrilled about the strong emergence of flavor, such as the Italian Originals. "People don't want bland anymore; they want flavor," he observes.

And with Meatsa Trio, Domino's delivered.