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The Domino’s Innovation Garage, aka the DIG, opened in August in a separate building next to the company’s main headquarters in Ann Arbor, Mich. It is home to software engineers coding in dimly lit rooms and project managers tinkering with kiosks, GPS pizza tracking and autonomous vehicle experiments. Domino’s considers the incubator space as a blank canvas for developing next-gen technologies.
The brand has spent the past 10 years creating industry-leading consumer-facing technologies with bot ordering, hot spot delivery and online pizza tracking. That type of innovation will continue in the innovation garage. However, company leaders emphasized that DIG will also focus on in-house technologies.
A large space on the first floor is dedicated to The DIG Store, where teams “live test” operational technologies developed for the Domino’s store of the future.
“It is a laboratory really for us to focus on innovation inside the four wall operations themselves,” CEO Ritch Allison said.
With bright lights beaming on the industrial space, the DIG store resembles a Hollywood movie or television set. Each piece of equipment is on casters. This allows teams to easily move items such as food assembly stations, monitors and kiosks for testing optimal layouts.
“We've got an environment over there set up that allows us to stand up or break down the store [easily] - something that's just impossible when you have fixed walls,” Allison said.
The Innovation Garage is home to teams dedicated to creating new ordering platforms.
Did you know? Domino’s offers more than a dozen non-traditional ways to order pizza. The company refers to this kind of technology as “Domino’s Anyware,” ordering platforms that use chat bots and voice assistants. Some of the most popular ways customers can order include Google Home, shown, and Amazon Alexa. Customers can also order by texting or using Facebook Messenger, Slack, and Twitter. Chevy cars equipped with the company’s in-vehicle commerce platform also feature Domino’s ordering.
“We want you to be able to order pizza no matter where you are in the digital ecosystem. No matter what platform you're using. No matter where you spend your time on your phone or your desktop,” Dennis Maloney, chief digital officer, said. “That's going to be our strategy for advancing our technology.”
He said the Innovation Garage is an extension of the brand’s 10-year turnaround journey. “We are never going to be finished.”
Adoption of the chain’s new GPS tracking platform is growing at a steady pace. The chain began testing the Uber-like car tracking system in 27 stores in Arizona earlier this year. Today, a mix of 400 franchise and company stores have adopted the technology in other parts of the U.S. including Miami, Houston and Salt Lake City.
Domino’s said the system, shown, benefits consumers and restaurant operators because it allows both to track where pizzas are on a map. Mike Grange, who oversees delivery innovations at Domino's, said operators adopting the system are seeing improvements in service and efficiencies.
Our DIG tour was capped with a presentation by Chief Technology Officer Kelly Garcia. He described the Innovation Garage as a place for risk-takers who work to make ordering frictionless and easy for customers. And, if that means they must fail a few times in testing before scoring a big win, that’s worth it.
“Even in failure, there's a whole lot to learn,” Garcia said. “If you’re not taking risks, ultimately you're becoming complacent.”
