How pizza giant Papa Johns makes 4 million dough balls a week
Papa Johns is the third-largest pizza delivery chain in the world. It makes all its own dough out of massive quality-control centers. While those centers have largely been automated, Papa Johns didn't touch the in-store pizza-making process. That is, until 2020. During high-pressure pizza days like Super Bowl Sunday, the company found a pain point: Stretching the dough by hand took too long. So the Atlanta test kitchen stepped in to develop a dough spinner that takes 13 seconds of make-time. Now, it's in 75% of North American stores. We went behind the scenes with Papa Johns six days before the Super Bowl to see how all this new tech is faring during crunch time.
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00:00 This giant vat of dough will become hundreds of Papa John's pizzas.
00:06 The chain mixes, slices, and forms all its own dough out of massive centers like this
00:14 one.
00:15 This is the company's largest, and it ships out ingredients, toppings, and pizza boxes
00:19 to about 400 stores across the southern U.S.
00:23 And the Super Bowl is one of the company's busiest times of the year.
00:27 It does get stressful.
00:28 It gets fast-paced.
00:31 That's because stores sell 67% more pies compared to an average sundae.
00:36 And they still try to get every pizza out the door within 18 minutes.
00:40 Repetition, repetition.
00:41 The more times you do this, the faster you're going to get.
00:45 The company even has a test kitchen that's developed machines to speed up pizza making.
00:49 Thirteen seconds when you're talking about a thousand pizzas saves a long time.
00:54 We went behind the scenes with Papa John's, six days before the Super Bowl, to see how
00:59 the chain slings out pizzas in a time crunch.
01:06 Papa John's is the third largest pizza delivery chain in the world, with about 5,900 locations
01:11 globally.
01:13 Its operation depends on huge quality control centers, like this one, which are essentially
01:17 giant pantries for the stores around them.
01:20 Every item that is edible, every item that is inedible, comes out of this facility.
01:25 Making dough used to be more manual, but in 2017, the company opened this facility, with
01:30 machines to make dough quicker and more consistently.
01:35 This one can mix 2,500 pounds of dough in 10 minutes.
01:42 This divider can cut 200 dough balls per minute, 50 more than an older center could do.
01:49 A conveyor belt quickly shapes them into a ball.
01:53 Then they go through proofing and another rounding process.
01:57 Then for the first time, workers touch the dough, rolling and placing it on a conveyor
02:02 belt by hand.
02:05 Robots take over again, organizing them onto trays so they won't stick together when they
02:09 puff up.
02:11 The robots are much more consistent, with less variance, you have less defects.
02:18 You just cruise, literally cruise.
02:22 The factory starts to pump out more dough in the five days leading up to the Super Bowl,
02:26 making 17,000 trays a day, instead of the usual 12,000.
02:32 Machines do a final visual inspection and metal detection.
02:36 Then conveyor belts take the dough to this massive spiral cooler.
02:40 It chills the dough down to the temperatures of the walking coolers.
02:43 While that tempts a secret, the company says it's never frozen.
02:49 Carlin Tucker is the distribution manager here, making sure all their giant fridges
02:53 are stocked full.
02:55 We got your green peppers right here.
02:58 We got your Italian sausage, chicken breast.
03:02 How about some baby spinach?
03:05 You want some baby spinach?
03:07 The freezers hold the meats and dessert.
03:09 When I say it's cold, it's really cold.
03:12 So usually when we're in here, you have to have a suit on because you can't be in here
03:15 too long or you'll freeze up.
03:18 You'll turn into a thin crust.
03:23 The company's first pizza came out of a DIY oven in the back of an Indiana tavern in 1984.
03:30 In a decade, Papa John's went from a standalone shop to a chain with nearly 500 locations.
03:36 At the center of its roaring success was founder John Schnatter.
03:40 He took the company public in 1993 and opened its massive Louisville, Kentucky headquarters.
03:46 But in 2018, he resigned from the board after he used a racial slur on a company call.
03:51 And in 2021, the pizza giant rebranded to Papa John's, no apostrophe.
03:58 That same year, it opened a second U.S. headquarters in Atlanta.
04:04 The Quality Control Center sits just up the road, in the middle of one of the chain's
04:08 largest markets.
04:10 Carlin's team supplies 400 stores across seven states.
04:14 Once they get an order, they move all the inventory onto trucks.
04:17 You have your boxes, you got your load locks.
04:21 The pressure's on Carlin's team prepping for the big game, too.
04:24 We have people come in on their off days because it's so heavy.
04:28 It's just all hands on deck.
04:31 Across the U.S., these centers will ship out over 1.5 million pounds of cheese and 5 million
04:37 dough balls this week.
04:40 But they have some helpful equipment.
04:42 So if we didn't have these forklifts, it would be very difficult to be able to be fast,
04:48 to be efficient.
04:49 We would definitely be working 15, 16, 17, maybe even 20 hours.
04:54 So it gives us the opportunity to be faster, to be more efficient.
04:58 While Papa John's automated much of its Atlanta dough center in 2017, it didn't touch the
05:03 pizza-making process.
05:05 The stores still made pizza by hand, and it took two minutes a pie.
05:10 But on a big day like the Super Bowl, a pain point emerged.
05:14 Stretching out the dough took too long.
05:18 So they brought the problem to the Papa John's test kitchen, also in Atlanta.
05:27 Here Joel and Chris test out solutions.
05:30 How do we test new products to ensure that they don't break our system from an operational
05:34 perspective?
05:36 In 2019, they invented a machine to flatten the dough a lot quicker.
05:40 So here's our dough spinner.
05:43 We integrated this into the system a few years ago, and it only takes about three seconds.
05:48 This is our dough docker.
05:50 This allows for the dough to still rise in the oven, but does get some of the air out
05:55 of the dough.
05:56 Then we just slap it to the correct size.
05:59 This is going to be our 14-inch pizza.
06:03 But the challenge is, how do they make sure this will work in every Papa John's kitchen
06:07 all over the world?
06:10 So they put the dough spinner through mock trials.
06:12 It took about a year of testing.
06:14 This is going to save us 13 seconds per pizza on average during our big day sales.
06:20 Which doesn't sound like a lot, but 13 seconds when you're talking about 1,000 pizzas saves
06:25 a long time.
06:27 In early 2020, Papa John's started rolling out the dough spinners in stores.
06:33 And really alleviated some of those pressures that our team members go through making those
06:36 pizzas every day, day in and day out, can get tiring.
06:41 This machine is going to do it right the first time, and it's going to do it right on the
06:44 thousandth time.
06:46 After we got into this and we realized that there was a lot of time savings to be found,
06:51 we got into our Papadia dough and our Papa Bites.
06:54 This machine helps thin out the dough and shaves eight seconds off the Papadia prep
06:58 time.
06:59 So think about what that does on our high compression days and our big business days.
07:03 They've also tested new pizza boxes.
07:05 As soon as it exits the oven, we're putting probes in the pizza to make sure that the
07:10 pizzas are hot.
07:12 Our boxes are vented so that they do not get steamed up and soggy.
07:15 And also obviously at Papa John's we have our garlic cups, so we have to be cognizant
07:19 of somewhere for that garlic to fit.
07:22 And then also the box needs to be operationally friendly, so something that team members are
07:26 able to pull down quickly, build efficiently.
07:29 Put a pizza in and get out the door as quickly as possible with no sticking points.
07:33 Store workers also complained that the chicken wings packaging made their fingers sticky.
07:38 So back in the day we used to have this as our packaging for wings.
07:42 And as you can see, it's not necessarily the greatest in visual and it doesn't retain that
07:47 heat that we look for.
07:48 So we took a step back and we just came up with this design.
07:51 Our team members can grab our wings out of the oven, dump them directly into this new
07:55 package, squirt some sauce on it.
07:59 Another key feature is we added a special place for this dip cup.
08:02 Once it's in there, give it a quick shake.
08:06 Now the dough spinner has made its way into 75% of North American stores.
08:11 The spinner right here is definitely the best tool in the restaurant for making pizzas.
08:15 This takes us from a two-minute make time to about a 60-second make time.
08:19 Once a team member stretches the dough and docks it, they layer on the sauce.
08:23 Fluffing up the cheese helps break up any clumps.
08:26 Finally, they add on toppings.
08:28 Fastest pizza I've ever made was a pepperoni pizza, large size, and under one minute.
08:32 Each pie gets a run through the belt oven for about five minutes.
08:35 But even with this new tech, big game days aren't any less stressful.
08:40 The pieces are so extremely high.
08:43 We have to put a lot of labor working.
08:47 It's just all hands on deck.
08:50 I'm going to say yes, pineapple belongs on pizza.
08:54 Anything sweet belongs on pizza, but of course, we love pineapples.
08:58 [MUSIC PLAYING]