Donatos Pizza Case Study

Donatos Pizza Case Study

The case study talks about fast food restaurants trying to keep up with latest diet within America. In this case specifically, it talks about the low carb diets, and if the industry should change their food recipes or offer alternative solutions. Tom Krouse, chief concept officer with Donato’s began noticing that at his company meetings, where pizza was served, little piles of crust were being left behind. After a bit of research, he discovered that his employees were avoiding the carbohydrates inherent in the grain-based foundation of every pizza on the market at the time. After continuous research Krouse realized that low carb dieting is nothing to ignore, and people are making it apart of their everyday lifestyle. Krouse decided to play around with the idea of low carb crust but it wasn’t successful, so he had the idea of a pizza without the crust, which essentially would just be the toppings on the pizza. After testing this idea in some store, the idea took off and they named this new pizza “no dough” pizza. After 6 ½ months after putting this pizza in their test stores, all 184 stores began serving “no dough” pizza.

1. Donatos started its research-based product development process to determine that the low-carb craze was no fad. The process starts with is developing the product prototype, followed by employee taste testing, concept screens (where participants, usually in a central location, are shown photographs of food products, and then queried about the item’s uniqueness, brand fit, price attractiveness, and the likelihood of purchase if the product were available), and ultimately in-restaurant tests in two or more restaurants within the chain. In-restaurant tests also include participants completing a self-administered intercept survey or, for delivery customers, a callback phone survey.

2. Wassup Donatos meeting conducted by the monthly routine, where each employee brings knowledge of popular culture and explain its effect on Donatos. It is this which makes Donatos will have a lot of information about diet and feeling that exist within a culture within the employee's information can be used by Donatos, to become an opportunity to develop a new product. For example, according to 2003 health focus trend reports, 26% of consumers of food are "carb conscious". This suggests that they are eating low-carb diet into their diet habits

This methodology can be used to establish the research question of product development.