Pizza for Breakfast?

We were talking about the new Domino’s offering the other day, when the question of whether this was really a good attempt to extend the company’s product line came up. For those of you who haven’t heard, there’s a location in Dayton, Ohio, near the University of Dayton, which is test-marketing a breakfast pizza, featuring a standard Domino’s crust with cheese, egg and bacon on top. You can check out the story from the New York Daily News website if you want to, but basically, it’s a case of Domino’s experimenting with expanding their operations to include a larger operational day. Whether or not this is a good idea is another matter…

Breakfast pizza isn’t a new idea in itself; I’ve encountered it in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York at different times over the past 15 years or so. As a food choice it’s no more exotic (or peculiar) than breakfast burritos or breakfast sandwiches, just to take the obvious examples; warm bread (toast) combined with egg and cheese (scrambled eggs with cheese) and bacon in a format that makes it easy to transport and consume. I’m not sure why it hasn’t caught on more widely, although a major part of the problem is that people are not familiar with the dish, and therefore don’t wake up thinking about rolling down to the corner for a slice of breakfast pizza. Since most Domino’s don’t have a dine-in option (or anywhere in the shop to do so), the company will also have to get people used to the idea of having their breakfast delivered, assuming that they can get people to purchase the things in the first place…

Now, on the face of it, this is a fairly standard strategic move to incrementally increase the company’s business. Since they already have the stores, the pizza ovens, the food preparation and storage equipment, the telephone lines, the cash registers, the credit card accounts, and so on, the only additional costs involved with being open for breakfast would be labor and utilities, plus whatever it costs to advertise that they’re now open for breakfast. These should not be excessive, especially since the breakfast product should not require a lot of preparation time itself, and the store can also used the morning shift to prepare food items for the lunch and dinner shifts, run maintenance and cleaning routines, and so on. And if the sales of the new product are disappointing it shouldn’t cost much to cancel the service and stop morning-shift operations. A better question is who is going to purchase a breakfast pizza in the first place?

Most of the people who already eat pizza for breakfast are just grabbing a slice of last night’s dinner entre out of the refrigerator (or whatever surface it was stuck to last night) on the way out the door; few of them are going to want a dedicated breakfast pizza. People who normally go out for breakfast are going to be looking for coffee (which Domino’s can’t presently supply) and places to sit (which Domino’s also can’t supply); people who order breakfast food in for business meetings and such are thinking muffins and fruit, not pizza – and will probably continue to do so. To change this strategic picture, the company will need to educate the public to the possibilities of breakfast pizza, presumably through an aggressive advertising campaign – and that will not be cheap…

It should be interesting to see how this one plays out. On the one hand, this experiment could be wildly successful, and within a few years you might find that coming to work and grabbing a slice on your way to your desk has become your standard form of breakfast. On the other hand, this experiment could end up going the same way as McDonald’s infamous circular hot dog…

But that’s a story for another day…