RUSSIA’S PIZZA KING CARVES A SLICE OF THE ACTION WITH TECHNOLOGY
▶ Fyodor Ovchinnikov, described as the ‘Steve Jobs of pizza,’ is disrupting the entire global fast-food industry
This industry is becoming a technology business and Dodo’s at the top of the class. It has the best platform we’ve seen
ALEX TROTTER QFA director
Once you crack the profit code for delivering hot pizzas in the Arctic, where blocks of cheese arrive on nuclear icebreakers, expanding into more hospitable climes such as Britain and Nigeria is as easy as pie.
Or so says Fyodor Ovchinnikov, the freshly crowned franchise czar of Russia and soon, he’s betting, beyond. From a single basement oven in his native Syktyvkar in the far north of Russia, the failed bookseller and serial blogger has turned Dodo Pizza into one of Europe’s fastest-growing restaurant chains, leapfrogging Papa John’s, Domino’s and Pizza Hut in his home market in just eight years.
An archaeologist by education, Mr Ovchinnikov, 38, and his franchisees have opened 457 pizzerias in Russia and 69 in 11 other countries. Dodo owns 23 of those itself, including its new flagship in China. Now he is planning to add another 1,000 in Europe, Asia and Africa over the next five years, a goal few people in the industry doubt he can achieve.
That is because of a secret sauce that isn’t edible, but ethereal – Dodo IS, a proprietary mix of application software and analytics stored in the cloud. Overseen by a “chief agile officer” and maintained by 120 technicians, it provides, among many other things, instant monitoring of cash flows, inventories and service times at every location in the network, all viewable with just a few taps on a tablet. And mandatory, live-streaming kitchen cams allow anyone with an internet connection to watch a Dodo pizza being made.
“We’re a cyborg company,” Ovchinnikov said at Dodo’s headquarters in Moscow. “We’re half food and half tech. That’s our advantage. We’re incredibly efficient.”
Dodo is also incredibly open for a successful enterprise in Russia. The company publishes much of the financial data it collects online, even revenue for the 500-plus franchise restaurants.
Weekly sales in dollar terms, for example, recently ranged from $48,164 (Dh176,882) at Dodo No 2 in Novy Urengoy in Siberia to $1,329 at Dodo No 2 in Karaganda, Kazakhstan. Two of the highest-grossing outlets are inside the Arctic Circle, in Norilsk and Salekhard.
Another selling point of Dodo IS is the ability to automatically create marketing campaigns for individual locales when sales dip below a certain threshold. Or, as he likes to put it, “when labour productivity is getting low”.
Mr Ovchinnikov recently sold the franchise rights for Nigeria to Quality Foods Africa, the same group of British investors that brought Krispy Kreme to that continent’s most populous country last year. QFA director Alex Trotter said the first of a planned 20 Dodos will open this month in Lagos.
“This industry is becoming a technology business and Dodo’s at the top of the class,” Mr Trotter said. “It has the best platform we’ve seen in fast food.”
Mr Ovchinnikov said the deal with QFA and continuing growth in Russia, Europe and Asia will help him meet his goals of hitting $500 million in network revenue by 2021 and $1 billion by 2024. He expects to do that in part by bucking prevailing trends in an industry that is undergoing a major technological shift.
While global fast-food giants led by McDonald’s are spending billions to develop delivery services, Dodo is redesigning its restaurants to attract more foot traffic and achieve what Mr Ovchinnikov calls perfect “brand balance”, which is sales parity between dining and delivery. A featured speaker at tech conferences who has been hailed by Microsoft for his pioneering use of its cloud platforms, Mr Ovchinnikov refuses to work with delivery apps such as Yandex in Russia. He says they sever the final link with customers that his wellcoached drivers complete.
Mr Ovchinnikov named his company and mascot after a flightless, extinct bird that is also a character in one of his favourite novels, Alice in
Wonderland. It’s a brand that is becoming synonymous not only with cutting-edge restaurant and delivery management but also guerrilla marketing.
Dodo made headlines from Washington to Tokyo with what it billed as the world’s first commercial delivery of pizzas by drone to customers in the central square in Syktyvkar in 2014. A video of the event earned him a cult following among entrepreneurially minded Russians.
A prominent journalist, Maxim Kotin, wrote a book about Mr Ovchinnikov called Nerds Do Business that