The next domino in Domino’s shift to third-party delivery is about to fall.
The fast-food pizza chain on Wednesday said that it will join the DoorDash marketplace nationwide this May and will expand to Canada later in the year, joining the nation’s largest third-party delivery aggregator after long holding out against such a move.
The company said that a test of the use of DoorDash is underway in select locations and is designed to help the chain reach new customers. A large subset of U.S. consumers simply prefer ordering delivery from one of the aggregators. Domino’s drivers will deliver pizzas ordered on the app.
“The ability to connect seamlessly with DoorDash customers means more sales for Domino’s stores, while efficiently leveraging our brand’s robust delivery network,” Joe Jordan, Domino’s chief operating officer and U.S. market president, said in a statement.
The move has long been expected and Domino’s largely signaled it in February, when CEO Russ Weiner told analysts that the company had started talks with “additional aggregator partners” and had started pilot tests in some locations.
Domino’s is largely bowing to reality. Third-party delivery has taken up a substantial space in the U.S. restaurant market. Delivery traffic has more than doubled since 2019, according to the National Restaurant Association, with aggregators getting all of that additional business.
And maybe more. Major pizza chains have struggled with sales weakness in the past three years. The three publicly traded pizza delivery chains, Domino’s, Papa Johns and Pizza Hut, averaged a 1% decline in same-store sales last year. That was largely due to weakness in their self-delivery.
Papa Johns, which first started using aggregators before the pandemic, now gets 17% of its sales from aggregators, compared with 35% from its own delivery channels. Multiple Pizza Hut operators, in fact, have abandoned the use of their own delivery drivers altogether.
Domino’s was the last holdout, but sales weakness of its own led it to change its mind in 2023 with an exclusive deal with Uber Eats.
That exclusivity ends on May 1, opening the door for Domino’s to start working with DoorDash.
That Uber Eats deal has been successful, now accounting for 3% of Domino’s sales after just more than a year.
Domino’s believes that use of aggregators could generate $1 billion in incremental sales. But it needs to be on multiple aggregators, and thus it has the DoorDash deal. “We know that aggregators are a meaningful sales-driving opportunity for us,” Weiner said. “The aggregator marketplace is the fastest-growing segment within QSR pizza, and we are just getting started”
For DoorDash, the agreement will put the nation’s largest pizza chain on its platform. Domino’s operates about 6,900 locations in the U.S. and generates more than $9 billion in sales, making it the last Top 10 restaurant chain on its platform.
“By joining forces, we’re bringing customers a new choice in the rapidly growing pizza category,” Prabir Adarkar, president of DoorDash, said in a statement.
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