Domino’s Pizza, founded in 1960 by Tom Monaghan, saw its birth as a small pizza store in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Some 50 years later, Domino’s Pizza now stands as the second-largest pizza chain in the United States, laying claim over 9,000 corporate and franchised stores in all 50 U.S. states and markets across the world. For most of us, we’ve grown up with the brand, so it’s doubtful we often think twice about the brand…the people behind it, their creative process, the corporate culture, and the mass production of an individual product like a pizza. What better way to get behind the scenes than to jump in head first and check out their corporate head quarters in Ann Arbor, MI and one of their nearby production facilities? That’s exactly what we did.

Within the past year, Domino’s has taken some considerable risk in overhauling their core product…their pizza. The new recipe was coupled with some rather interesting and commendable marketing tactics consisting of bringing the brand’s taste problems and critiques to the forefront, voicing complaints about their “bland” tasting pizza of yester-year and subsequently responded with this brand new recipe. Results were reportedly fabulous, as Domino’s new recipe led the company into consecutive quarters of positive growth. During our visit, we got to learn more about their upcoming initiatives, some new products and technologies, as well as become a direct part of their goal of brand transparency into the future.

The day we spent with Domino’s consisted of learning about their product creation process, from initial conception, to taste testing, to mass production, to final delivery. It really begins to boggle the mind when you get to see how a product you’ve been accustomed to since birth actually comes to be on the development end.

Our first stop in the day was a quick drive a few miles away from the corporate building to their local Michigan plant to see how their new dough is created fresh every day. One of the most interesting things in this room, is the crazy X-Ray machine they have going to make sure there’s absolutely nothing in your dough…other than dough. While that rarely ever happens, if anything ever gets caught on the screen, the entire system gets shut down and no dough is processed until the source of the issue is traced. Pretty gnarly stuff!

After wandering their facility for a bit longer, we headed back to headquarters to learn more about their new ingredients, their marketing tactics, get familiar with a few of their campaigns coming out in the couple months, share some stories and of course…make some pizza in their test kitchen!

You might notice the jovial man in the red shirt as Sam Fauser, or “the chef in the Domino’s commercials”. Other people you will see scattered throughout this post will be in the video below, including our guide for the day Phil Lozen, head chef Brandon Solano and other Domino’s personalities. Brandon and Sam dove head first into helping us as we learned how to make our own pizzas with the new dough and the fresh new ingredients. Have you seen any of the recent national commercials from the Domino’s camp recently? Here’s one that should give you a good overview of what’s going on in the company, it’s actually an interesting watch as well:

We have a few more interesting stories from the trip and some good news reads, but we’ll scatter those into the week.