The Domino’s Pizza Points for Pies program, an award winner in the Creative Campaign category at the 2019 Loyalty Expo, featured state-of-the-art technology. It enabled app-users to take a picture, at which point AI would determine whether the image contained a pizza. Then, the AI would offer rewards points. Amazingly, this tech was developed in-house.
The pizza company has spent years focused on cutting-edge technology created and built largely by teams at its World Resource Center in Ann Arbor. Those cross-functional teams now have a new space called Domino’s Innovation Garage where they can collaborate on, create, and test new ideas to enhance the brand’s capabilities and value proposition. The Innovation Garage, located at Domino’s Farms in Ann Arbor, will celebrate its grand opening on Wednesday, August 21.
“Domino’s Innovation Garage is focused on accelerating Domino’s spirit of creativity and collaboration,” says Kelly Garcia, Domino’s Chief Technology Officer. “As a pizza company with a focus on technology, we want our team members to have a workspace that encourages experimentation and fosters an environment to take risks, test innovations, and fail-fast so they can bring their best cutting-edge ideas to life for the brand’s customers and stores.”
The new 33,000-square-foot, two-story building has an open-concept design space for 150 team members, as well as collaboration workspaces, private meeting rooms, and a fully-functioning pizza theater. Project-based teams will use the pizza theater, which features the next-generation design, to develop and test new technology, such as ordering kiosks and a carryout tracker, in a store setting.
Domino’s Innovation Garage will also have a dedicated space for testing delivery innovations, including GPS delivery tracking, a customer interface on autonomous pizza delivery vehicles, and robots such as Nuro’s R2, an unmanned vehicle that will test pizza deliveries later this year. In addition to future technology, the facility will hold all of Domino’s current AnyWare ordering technology, in-store technology, and a quality assurance lab for testing pretotypes.
“Having a hub for our community of smart, creative and dynamic team members to develop our brand and take it to the next level is important for our continued success,” says Garcia. “We’re proud to now have a space dedicated to learning, exploring, testing, and launching new ideas in a way that only Domino’s can do.”