What are the busiest pizza days of the year and how does Domino’s Pizza stay ready? With Thanksgiving here, you’ve probably got turkey and all the trimmings on the brain. But you might be surprised to learn that Thanksgiving Eve—the night before the big day—is actually one day of the year when more people have pizza on the brain.
For Domino’s, that means being ready for that massive spike in demand—both in the kitchen and the data center.
Pizzas and Petabytes: What the Busiest Pizza Days Demand
For a company that hinges on technology to seamlessly deliver pizza around the globe, this kind of spike doesn’t just mean more dough gets slung. Busy days mean kitchens and data go into overdrive. Let’s break down what those pie cravings mean for operations and what they demand from Domino’s IT infrastructure:
More pizzas (and pizza preferences)
- Domino’s delivers an average of 1.5 million pizzas a day around the globe, but that number can jump by 30% when demand spikes.¹ That’s a lot of pizza, and supply chains have to be ready.
- It’s also a lot of combinations. There are 34 million unique ways to order a Domino’s pizza.² Customers can save their favorites in “Easy Orders” and reorder with a single click, tap, tweet, or command.
- Customer data ramps up with every new Pizza Profile created—and leveraging that data has enabled some fun features like the “Mind Ordering” app. Is it telepathy, AI, or data?
More online orders
- Domino’s generated more than 80% of sales via digital ordering channels in the U.S. in 2023³—and ordering systems have to keep up with anytime, anywhere orders, including those coming in from smart devices, Slack, and Twitter.
- Ordering platforms via its AnyWare technology allow customers to order via Amazon Alexa, text-to-order (with a 🍕 emoji!), on their Apple Watches, and more—on any device.
More deliveries
- “Where’s my pizza?!” Domino’s broke new ground with its innovative Domino’s Pizza Tracker, which uses GPS coordinates to keep customers updated in real time. The amount of data powering this experience can be enormous when thousands of pizzas are en route around the country.
- In 2023, Domino’s launched Pinpoint Delivery, the first restaurant delivery service to deliver food based on GPS and pin dropped locations. Customers can get pizzas delivered to them wherever they are, without a typical address.
How Domino’s Stays Ready Day to Day—and on Thanksgiving Eve
Over nearly a decade, Domino’s transactions have increased five-fold, made possible by an aggressive digital transformation strategy. It all starts with a strong foundation of data storage to help them be ready for the busiest pizza days and beyond.
Dan Djuric, VP of global infrastructure and information management at Domino’s, says, “We started with a structured and stable foundation, looking at the fastest data mobility platform we could leverage. That’s where we capitalize on the Pure ecosystem.” A customer database running on Pure Storage® FlashArray™ and FlashBlade® technology captures every transaction—which can amount to 3,300 transactions per minute on an average Friday or Saturday.
“The Pure platform was not only the ability to build and scale our infrastructure from a virtual machine standpoint but also drive all the information into our four walls to help innovate.”
Craving a pizza? So are we.
Learn more about how data is Domino’s most important ingredient.
1. https://www.dominos.com/en/about-pizza/
2. https://www.dominos.com/en/pages/content/nutritional/nutrition
3. https://biz.dominos.com/about-us/innovations/
