Sunday, August 24, 2025

How the Domino’s pizza tracker conquered the business world

One cheesy progress update at a time.

BY ALEX MAYYASI

In 2009, Domino’s was in trouble. Sales were in decline. Its pizza tied for last in industry taste tests with Chuck E. Cheese. A YouTube video of a store employee putting cheese up their nose had gone viral.

J. Patrick Doyle was appointed CEO a year later to oversee a turnaround with a ballsy premise: publicly admitting that their pizza sucked and showing customers that they were improving their pies. “I used to joke that if it didn’t work, I would probably be the shortest-tenured CEO in the history of American business,” Doyle told Bloomberg.

Transparency became Domino’s modus operandi. They aired ads in which Doyle and others issued mea culpas for their crummy pizza and released a documentary about revamping their recipe. They shared footage of people visiting the farms that grew Domino’s tomatoes. They used real photos sourced from customers – even of pies mangled during delivery.

For the next decade, Domino’s stock rose like dough in an oven. On his show, Stephen Colbert praised the campaign’s honesty, took a bite of a Domino’s slice, and asked, “Is that pizza, or did an angel just give birth in my mouth?”

Few companies have copied Domino’s “we suck” strategy. Instead, it’s another bit of transparency from Domino’s struggle era that is the great legacy of its turnaround: the pizza tracker.

The bustling kitchen at a Miami Domino’s. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

You know the pizza tracker. You’ve likely used it to follow your pizza’s journey from a store to your home. But even if you haven’t, you live in the world the Domino’s pizza tracker built. Because in marketing, product development, and user experience, the pizza tracker is an icon. An inspiration. A platonic ideal that has been imitated across industries ranging from food-delivery apps to businesses where the only grease is on the hands of auto mechanics.

Show them the sausage

I enjoy restaurants with open kitchens: line cooks slicing entire carrots in a blink, chefs sipping broth and nodding approvingly, all in an elegant ballet of speed and craftsmanship.

But the business world doesn’t have many open kitchens. We receive our sneakers in the mail without ever seeing a Nike factory floor or Adidas brainstorming session. We receive cash from an ATM without any sense of the impressive technology under the hood.

Tami Kim thinks that’s a shame. An associate professor of business administration at Dartmouth College, she’s an advocate of an open-kitchen approach called operational transparency that she believes can increase customers’ appreciation of a product or service – and employees’ motivation and productivity too. Here’s how:

1. Open windows: Franchises like Starbucks have replaced many drive-through intercoms with cameras and video displays. In an experiment that used iPads to give students a view of cafeteria cooks fulfilling their hamburger and hot dog orders (and chefs a view of the students), Kim and her coauthors found that diners’ satisfaction increased without sacrificing speed in the kitchen.
2. Price transparency: Some e-commerce sites break down the price of their shirts or wallets by the cost of materials, labor, transportation, and tariffs – and compare their markup to the industry average. One study showed this transparency boosted sales by ~26%.
3. The “Labor Illusion”: Many AI models show a breakdown of the steps the chatbot is taking to answer your question. In another study, researchers found that travel sites like Kayak revealing their behind-the-scenes work (“Now getting results from American Airlines… from JetBlue… 133 results found so far…”) led to increased perceptions of quality and willingness to pay.

The cheesy goodness that awaits a fulfilled order. (Photo illustration by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

The pizza tracker came out in 2008, around when Kim and her colleagues started studying operational transparency. Domino’s declined an interview, but according to a case study on Domino’s, the tracker’s creation was spurred by the insight that online orders were more profitable – and made customers more satisfied – than phone or in-person orders. The company’s push to increase digital sales from 20% to 50% of its business led to new ways to order (via a tweet, for example) and then a new way for customers to track their order.

“With technology, it's just so much easier for companies to reveal parts of their operations without a ton of effort,” says Kim. Domino's was already tracking the status of orders on their back end, so they could show that progress to customers without disrupting operations.

“Every time we present this [research on operational transparency], we predominantly use that example because it's such a neat and successful example,” she says.

“Also, my husband and I were avid consumers of Domino's.”

The Hustle

Kim doesn’t think transparency is always good for a business’s bottom line. When I ask if sausage companies should show people how the sausage gets made, she says perhaps not. (And politely tells me that everyone makes that joke.)

But she does think many business operations could benefit from more transparency.

“Air travel is one,” she says. “There isn't a ton of information readily available to travelers. Explaining the reason for delays… even something like, "We're now cleaning the airplane," or ‘We are now checking the bathrooms.’ I think I personally would love information like that to get some sense of certainty.”

A wrinkle in (pizza) time

For designer Shuya Gong, though, the magic of the pizza tracker isn’t its window into Domino’s operations. It’s how it manipulates time.

“I think the pizza tracker essentially speeds up time for you,” says Gong, formerly a design director at IDEO, a design and consulting firm.

Gong points to the return trip effect: When you go somewhere and come back via the same route, the way back feels faster. One study of the effect found that it’s likely caused by people underestimating the duration of the first leg. So when Domino’s sends its customers (slightly high undergrads, parents who promised a pizza night) lots of updates, it feels like a return trip, and therefore a shorter wait.

Did your pizza arrive in under 30 minutes? Were the making and baking quick? With the pizza tracker in customers’ hands, it doesn’t matter as much. “Instead of moving through a normal calendar or clock-based static time, you are moving through pizza time,” says Gong.

The Hustle

Just as important is how the tracker’s colorful visualization of pizza progressing toward your home reduces your anxiety. “You’re not in the pizza shop watching a pizza get made,” says Gong. “But you still feel like it’s being taken care of.”

According to Marty Gage, longtime VP of User Experience Research at Lextant, this is key to designing successful “journeys” for customers.

“People want a stress-free lifestyle,” he says. “Communicating progress gives people a sense of feeling in control, because they're aware of what's going on… If you don't feel in control, you'll never be able to relax.”

Once upon a time, when someone ordered Domino’s, they knew they should get their pie in “30 minutes or less.” (A guarantee Domino’s made in the 1980s and 1990s.) But as 15 minutes stretched into 20, then 25, and maybe even 30 minutes, all without any sign of a delivery driver, you might wonder: Is my pizza about to arrive? Or is it sitting, unloved and unmourned, on the store’s countertop?

In the era of the pizza tracker – and its many copycats – you don’t need to anxiously call the store. You can see progress being made, even if it’s slower than you might like.

The pizza tracker tells you what to expect and when, offering users a sense of control. (Photo by Jeffrey Greenberg/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

Gage describes his firm as often being tasked by clients to understand their customers’ desired experience with a product or service. What’s their ideal emotional state? The magic of the pizza tracker is that it turned the hangry-prone experience of waiting for a yearned-for pie of tomato and cheese into a soothing and even fun experience characterized by multiple dopamine hits (“Ooooh, they put our pizza in the oven!”) and interactions with the Domino’s brand.

Pizza pioneers

The pizza tracker is essentially a progress bar. Domino’s did not invent the progress bar. Gage and Gong both believe that companies like FedEx were updating customers on the progress of their packages back when Domino’s was trying to surpass Chuck E. Cheese in pizza quality.

Nevertheless, they both say the Domino’s pizza tracker was a pioneering approach.

Gong believes that Domino’s was the first to bring the concept to food orders – and to make it colorful, interesting, and fun. You expect a logistics company to keep you updated on logistics. But it’s not obvious that a pizza shop should send you updates in a way that looks like a cheesy video game meter.

“The context where you typically see progress bars is in something digital,” says Gage. “So to take that and move it into the context of when your food's going to be ready was probably a new application.”

As a result, the pizza tracker comes up frequently in their work.

Clients regularly ask Gong if they can do something like the Domino's pizza tracker. “Super often,” she says.

The tracker gives customers a window into how the pizza gets made. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

With other clients, “there’s usually a moment when the designer and I will be like, ‘Oh, yeah, they need a pizza tracker.” In fact, Gong will use “pizza tracker” as a stand-in for the entire status-bar-and-updates category, much like how people use Kleenex and Band-Aid.

Gage says he first remembers using the pizza tracker when working with Pep Boys, the auto- and tire-repair company, in 2014. His firm often gathers their clients’ customers or target customers in a room and shows them “stimuli,” such as images or gifs on an iPad. When potential Pep Boys customers saw an image of the Domino’s pizza tracker, they perked up. They wanted car repair to feel like waiting for a Domino’s pie – they wanted updates and a comforting sense of progress.

The Hustle

When Gage told me about his Pep Boys work, I realized I was living in the world he’d designed, with help from the pizza tracker. A week earlier, I’d dropped my car for routine servicing at a dealership. After two hours, I wondered if something was wrong. If they’d forgotten me. If I should call.

Then I got a text: They were inspecting my car. A visual depicted the inspection as the first step of five. I felt calmed. Twenty minutes later, a new text alerted me that they’d moved on to repairs (step 2), and I could watch a video of their inspection.

Today, the world is full of pizza trackers: TurboTax shows customers how many steps are left in completing their tax returns. Uber and Lyft update us as they request a ride, confirm a driver, and calculate that our driver is just two minutes away. ChatGPT shows us how far along their chatbot is in reasoning through our question and delivering an answer. Not all were based directly on the pizza tracker, but each responds to the same human desire for progress and control – and the fact that Domino’s trained us all to expect it.

“[The pizza tracker] is clear and simple and straightforward,” says Gage. “It emerged into our collective consciousness… It became iconic. It’s an iconic version of a progress bar.”

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