For all of the flak I give them, I’m a pretty regular customer at Domino’s. Mostly because I live in Surulere and my favourite pizza place is all the way in VI. It also doesn’t help that a Domino’s outlet popped up 5 minutes away from where I live a couple of months ago.
If I’m being fair, I’ve probably been overly critical of the pizza at Domino’s. If you know what to order, they can be decent almost good even. My current favourite indulgence is the pan version of their ‘Extravaganza’ (hold the pepperoni).
What I find most interesting about Domino’s apart from the fact that they don’t seem to know what cheese is, or that stew isn’t a substitute for pizza sauce, is that they constantly find new ways to draw customers in. Since they opened their doors in 2012 they’ve created new flavours, sizes and campaigns to cater specifically to the Nigerian market. And from all indication, it’s working. 7 years after they opened their first outlet in Lagos, they now have a hundred stores across the country.
A couple of weeks ago, the pizza chain launched an aggressive campaign to market ‘Chairman’ their extra large pizza. This just comes just a couple of months after they launched ‘Smallie’ their budget size pizza on steroids. It is a near bite-size version of all of their pizza flavours and it costs just 500 naira making it a perfect quick snack for one person. It was an instant hit.
Not one to step off their competitors’ necks, last month they introduce a new pizza size – Chairman. The 16-inch extra large pizza is the biggest size you can get at any pizza outlet in Lagos. Priced between 6,200 to 7,000 naira I got curious about whether or not coughing out more money for those extra inches was really worth it.
For more context, the medium-sized pizza at Domino’s is 12 inches round while the large size is 14 inches. Dominos pizzas come priced at different rates for different flavours and sizes. You could also add on or take out a bunch of stuff which tends to affect the price. To conduct my experiment for this article however, I decided to stick to a classic – plain old pepperoni, no extra cheese or frills.
A medium sized box of their Classic Pepperoni cost 2,700 naira, a large size costs 4,000 naira, and the new ‘Chairman’ size costs 6,200 naira. So while the extra two inches I’d get when upgrading from medium to large will cost me an additional 1,300 naira, It’ll cost an additional 2,200 naira to upgrade from a large box to ‘Chairman’ and I’d still be getting only two extra inches. So I went back to scour through the promotional content they had put out to market this new size. According to their ads ‘Chairman’ is 30% bigger than their regular large size and they are right, a 16-inch pizza is actually about 31% larger than a 14 inch. Still, the math wasn’t adding up for me. Why did I have to pay 2,200 naira to upgrade from the large to ‘Chairman’, but only 1,300 naira to upgrade from medium to large.
However, here’s the thing when it comes to circles, it wasn’t enough to calculate the circumference and use that, you also need to calculate the surface area and all that jazz. God bless the internet of nifty tools you never knew you needed because I’m ridiculously bad at math and any calculations I would have attempted would have ended up being absurdly flawed. I stumbled on a pizza calculator that would automatically let me know which size was more bang for buck and got to work. I started with comparing the medium to large, turns out a medium sized pizza is more worth your money, and every bite of a large sized pizza is 9% more expensive than medium.
Then I compared the large size to ‘Chairman’ and the large had it. Each bite of ‘Chairman’ is a whole 19% more expensive than the large size. You do get 3% more topping on every bite, which I guess counts for something.
Even though the ‘Chairman’ might truly be 30% bigger than the large size that extra 2,200 naira you have to pay for it isn’t worth it. It also turns out your best bet when buying a pizza at Dominos is the medium size. However, they have a turn of deals and promotions currently running to push ‘Chairman’ now, you guys might want to get in there.
