Domino’s Pizza Italia has extinguished pizza ovens

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Domino’s Pizza Italia has extinguished pizza ovens

The pizza ovens in the country where pizza is invented have been extinguished by the company's Italian franchise.

In 2015, the company entered the Italian market, but seems to have been affected by a proliferation of home-delivery food during the Pandemic and a desire for more artisanal pies.

ROME — It turns out that Italians don't like pineapple on their pizza. Or at least not enough to keep nearly three dozen Domino's Pizza franchises afloat. The Italian outlets of the American pizza conglomerate extinguished their pizza ovens last month, unable to win over picky palates in the place where pizza was invented. The company's Italian website was live, but outlets in Turin, Parma, Rome and elsewhere offered the same discouraging message: Sun. Domino's international map was up to date. It listed 90 international markets but Italy was not included in it.

The company had 10.6 million euro $10.8 million of debt at the end of 2020, according to Bloomberg. The closure ended an ambitious business venture that had a goal to tantalize Italians looking to try something new, like cheeseburger pizza or BBQ chicken pizza. In 2015, Domino s Pizza Italia opened its first store in Milan, thanks to a franchising agreement with a local company, ePizza. In a legal filing in Milan in April, lawyers for ePizza said that the company had been optimistic about entering the Italian market in 2015, the second largest market in the world of pizza eaters after the United States. Italy didn't have a structured, large scale home delivery model like the Domino's Pizza model at the time. Two years ago, media reports reported on the Italian company's plans to open 850 stores over the next decade, with the aim of claiming a 2 percent stake in the national pizza market.

The coronaviruses changed everything. With restaurants and bars closed for long periods of time during sundry lockdowns, many began to adopt the takeout and home delivery model that Domino s Pizza had tried to dominate Italy with. According to the April legal filing in Milan, there has been an increase in the competition for ePizza, due to the proliferation of food delivery platforms like Deliveroo, Glovo or Just Eat. Representatives for ePizza and Domino's Pizza in the United States and Italy didn't respond immediately to requests for comment. Other culinary ventures that naysayers said were doomed to fail in Italy have done well. When Starbucks opened its first Italian venue in 2018, many Italians said that they would snub the company's maxi sizes, and prices because of the company's thimble-sized espressos. Percassi, the Italian licensee for the American company, has opened 18 stores in northern and central Italy, including a drive through. Alessandro Lazzaroni, who was the chief executive of Domino's Pizza Italia for five years, left the company in December 2020 and is now the chief executive of Crazy Pizza, a high-end pizzeria started by Italian businessman Flavio Briatore, a former director of the Benetton and Renault Formula One racing teams. Crazy Pizza made headlines in Italy this summer after Neapolitan pizza makers complained that the pizzas were too expensive. Italians are picky about their pizza. Stefano Auricchio, the director general of an association that protects real Neapolitan pizza, said he was sorry to hear that Domino's Pizza had closed because families have fewer options to choose from. He said that Italians had evolved their palate for pizza in recent years and were looking for more artisanal products over chain brands. He said that there is a tendency to recognize the work of the chef and the quality of the products.