In 2009, Domino’s built an entire ad campaign, “Pizza Turnaround,” around the idea that its pizza wasn’t very good. Then-CEO Patrick Doyle was featured in the ads and related videos.
“There comes a time when you know you’ve got to make a change. You know, you can’t lead a company like this unless you love food. I love food. I love pizza,” he said.
The ads showed actual focus groups with comments about the chain’s pizza.
“Pizza, where’s the love? It’s bread, sauce, cheese, fresh ingredients. It doesn’t feel like there’s much love in Domino’s pizza,” one woman said.
Another added, “Domino’s pizza crust to me is like cardboard.” Other comments included “the sauce tastes like ketchup,” “totally void of flavoring,” and “worst excuse for pizza I have ever had.”
Doyle embraced the hate and used it as a way to publicly reset the brand.
“You can either use negative comments to get you down, or you can use them to excite you and energize your process of making a better pizza. We did the latter,” he said.
Domino’s chose to make a negative a positive by remaking its pizza recipe.
Now, about 16 years later, Papa Johns CEO Todd Penegor has made a similar admission about his company’s product and says he plans to make changes.
Papa Johns CEO contradicts the chain’s marketing
Papa Johns has long touted the quality of its pizza with its tagline: “Better Ingredients. Better Pizza.”
It turns out, however, that “better” may not actually mean good.
Penegor addressed his chain’s shortcomings during an appearance at the recent Piper Sandler 5th Annual Growth Frontiers Conference. Unlike Doyle back in the day, he didn’t say the pizza was bad, although he admitted it could be better.
“I think our real biggest opportunity, though, is really to focus on the core. What do we need to do to renovate our core?” he said.
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By the “core,” Penegor means the sauce, crust, and cheese of Papa Johns pizza.
“We’re going to have to look at the quality of all of our ingredients. Lots of little things have changed for all the right reasons over many years, and we’re going to go back and look at everything. The sweetness of our dough, or sweetness of our sauce, and how our sauce is actually being developed and delivered,” he said.
He believes that Papa Johns can be better, but it’s also important to see how he frames the word “better.”
“Renovating” the core to get the crave back, to make sure that we can connect to the hearts and minds of not just the folks that have stuck with us, but those folks that have been lapsed, is a big opportunity ahead for us to compete even better and truly be a cut above the big box QSR pizza players,” he said.
Domino's
Papa Johns and Domino’s aren’t really selling pizza
Before admitting it had lousy pizza, Domino’s didn’t build its marketing around the idea of offering a quality product. In fact, for decades, the core Domino’s marketing promises was its 30-minutes-or-less delivery.
Doyle always understood that Domino’s wasn’t in the pizza business as much as it was in the business of making it really easy get a pizza delivered.
When the chain added the ability to deliver to locations without an address, like a spot on the beach, or a bench in the park, he called it part of the company’s “mission of industry-leading convenience and the ability to order from us anywhere, anytime,” Matt Cochrane of the Motley Fool reported.
A few years ago, over a nicer pizza at a pricey local place, I asked Cochrane, a friend and former colleague who has multiple children, why he ordered Domino’s regularly. He noted the size of his family and brought up how cheaply he could feed them from Domino’s, which had a $5.99 medium promotion at the time, versus the $25 pie we were sharing.
When Domino’s changed its pizza recipe, the company wasn’t going for great. It was aiming for better.
You can’t sell any two great pizzas for $6.99 (the current lead Domino’s promotion) and make money. So Domino’s is simply trying to deliver the best value, and the company even has a term for that.
“We’re driving renowned value through national promotions, Domino’s rewards, and by growing on aggregator platforms,” CFO Sandeep Reddy said during the chain’s second-quarter 2025 earnings call.
Papa Johns has work to do
Domino’s isn’t trying to convince customers that its pizza is merely cheap. It’s trying to convince them that the pizza itself delivers enough quality and customization that paying more elsewhere isn’t necessary.
Outgoing Domino’s CEO Russell Weiner reinforced the idea that Domino’s efficiency is its business during his remarks on the Q2 2026 earnings call.
“The winners in QSR over time are the brands that can grow order counts while driving healthy ticket through disciplined pricing. That has been Domino’s formula for success. Since I joined the company at the end of 2008, we have more than doubled the number of orders coming through our system in the U.S., resulting in double-digit market share gains,” he said.
To do that, you need a product that people like, even if part of the reason they like it is the price, shared RTM Nexus CEO Dominick Miserandino. He wasn’t as concerned about Penegor stepping on the company’s slogan as he was about Papa Johns delivering on his words.
“Consumers don’t grade a pizza chain on its slogan. They take a bite and decide whether they want to order it again,” he told TheStreet.
Penegor, he noted, has made a big promise to customers.
“Papa Johns has spent decades telling customers it has better ingredients and better pizza, so when its own CEO says the core pizza needs work, that creates a pretty high bar. Improving sauce, cheese, and execution may sound like small changes, but those are exactly the things that determine whether someone comes back,” he added.
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