QSR May 2023

BRAND INNOVATION

Staffing shortages have taken a significant bite of pizza deliv ery, too. Capacity constraints limited Domino’s and Pizza Hut’s ability to fully meet orders in the channel last year. The impact of staffing shortages on delivery was evident in the first quar ter when domestic same-store sales fell 6 percent at Pizza Hut and 3.6 percent at Domino’s. Pizza Hut ended the year with same-store sales down 1 percent. Domino’s saw same-store sales decline 0.8 percent, marking the company’s first nega tive comps result on an annual basis since 2008. Papa Johns’ same-store sales were up 1 percent for the year, making it the only one of the big three publicly traded pizza chains to deliver positive comps in 2022. Pizza Hut pivoted and embraced third-party delivery, inte

grating white-label delivery into its point-of-sale platform and expanding access to the brand via aggregators’ online mar ketplaces. “The integration of third-party delivery apps has enabled Pizza Hut team members to process delivery orders with new levels of ease while also giving us the ability to win new guests and compete for new occasions that a customer may have not previously considered Pizza Hut for,” Pizza Hut president David Graves says. “Aggregators brought incremental custom ers into our business, and we’ve seen meaningful improvement on delivery sale trends since we started working with them more intentionally in late 2022. In early 2022, we saw approx imately five transactions per store through aggregators, and

at the end of 2022, we had increased to nearly fifty—based on a weekly total—so, these transactions certainly show a signif icant lift.” Franchisees are deciding for themselves how they want to work with aggregators. Increasingly, they’re opting to gain access to both the mobile platforms and the out side delivery drivers to bolster fulfillment during peak times when they need the extra capacity. And since the brand worked to ensure economics are roughly the same across channels, it’s more or less indifferent in terms of where the sales fall. While Weiner has hinted that Domino’s

PIZZA HUT’S SAME-STORE SALES DROPPED 1 PERCENT IN 2022.

PIZZA HUT (3)

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MAY 2023 | QSR | www.qsrmagazine.com