A Saucy Fight for a Slice of the Pie

• Share

John Smith's airliner sat at the gate for two hours at Pittsburgh International Airport, and he was famished. What to do? The Larkspur, Calif., lawyer walked into the terminal building, picked up a telephone and called a local Domino's Pizza outlet. Sure enough, 18 minutes later, a delivery boy, clad in red and blue, arrived at Gate 36 carrying a giant pizza with everything on it. Said Smith: "When I walked onto the plane with the pizza, everyone cheered."

It takes hustle like the delivery boy's to get ahead these days in the pizza business, where competition is as red hot as a pie straight from the oven. The pizza segment of the fast-food industry, overshadowed in the past by the marketing battles among the hamburger chains, has sprung to life with speedy- delivery contests, price wars and new-product campaigns. "It's an all-out conflagration," says Charles Henderson, vice president of marketing for Godfather's Pizza, the fifth largest U.S. chain (586 outlets). "This will make burger wars look like a neighborhood skirmish." Rather than fight it out, Pillsbury, the parent firm of Godfather's, has decided to sell the chain. Herman Cain, president of Godfather's, is leading a management takeover of the restaurants.

The stakes in the pie fight are high. Even as growth in fast-food sales (1987 U.S. total: $56 billion) is slowing, pizza purchases are booming. Americans will spend an estimated $15 billion on pizza this year, more than twice what they spent just five years ago. As pizza has become more popular, the chains have seemingly sprinkled their outlets on every street corner: Pizza Hut, the largest, has more than 5,400 outlets in the U.S. and 6,200 worldwide. Even McDonald's has test-marketed a pie, McPizza. With so much competition, "it's not enough anymore just to have the best pizza in town," says Paula Werne, editor of the trade publication Pizza Today.

Aside from taste, the most important weapon of the great pizza war is home delivery. While mom-and-pop parlors have long offered this service, the upstart Domino's Pizza of Ann Arbor, Mich., upped the ante. Promising a $3 discount on the price of any pie that takes longer than 30 minutes to arrive, Domino's, now the second largest chain, has grown to 4,375 outlets. At least one Domino's operator even delivers by boat. Art Hurteau, 29, owner of an outlet on Missouri's Lake of the Ozarks, maintains a fleet of ten speedboats to get pies to vacationers. Starting this week, Hurteau's employees will be cruising the lake, taking orders from boaters and transmitting them to headquarters by radio. Pizza Hut, which in the past offered only table service and pies to go, now includes home delivery at 1,000 of its outlets. Keeping the product hot counts too: Pizza Hut claims that it delivers its pies in containers made from space-suit material, which provides extra insulation.