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Drones soon to be delivering Domino's pizza — and that's just the start

Drones soon to be delivering Domino's pizza — and that's just the start

There was a period of time just a few years ago, where the only way to order a pizza, or any food for that matter, was to either head over to the restaurant in question, or pick up a phone and place an order verbally.

In today’s internet-connected world, however, this is no longer the case. A pizza, regardless of how complicated or specific your taste may be, or even full meals via apps like Ritual or Feast in the Toronto area, can be ordered with a few swipes on your smartphone’s touchscreen.

While the rise of pizza ordering technology has expectedly made it difficult for smaller operations to compete, the giant’s of the industry like Pizza Pizza, Domino's and Pizza Nova, as well as a variety of other large-scale pizza chains globally, all offer customers the ability to order pizza in a simpler fashion with the help of mobile technology.

Just last week, Domino’s Pizza in New Zealand announced it would be introducing drone delivery service. The flying robots, operated by Flirtey, aren’t restricted by roads, and could prove to be an even faster way to get pizza to your door. If successful, Domino’s will look into rolling the drones out in Australia, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Japan and Germany.

Domino's has enlisted a flying delivery drone. (Drive)
Domino's has enlisted a flying delivery drone. (Drive)

Due to the complex nature of regulating where drones can fly, it’s not a solution that can be used everywhere just yet. But the pizza industry remains on the cutting edge of technology in Canada in many other ways.

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Pizza apps are everywhere

First off, almost every major pizza company in Canada has some kind of pizza ordering app. Pizza Pizza, Pizza Nova, Domino’s, Little Caesars and Pizza Hut, all have iOS and Android apps. Only Panago Pizza, a brand with a significant presence in Toronto and other major Canadian cities, offers just an iOS app.

Unfortunately more utopian ways of ordering pizza such as via the Xbox One’s Kinect, or through the Amazon Echo thanks to Alexa, a voice-activated assistant that’s not yet available in Canada, aren’t possible north of the U.S. border, though like many of the other innovative pizza ordering methods discussed in this story, that could change in the near future.

Are bots the future of ordering pizza?

The Domino’s delivery drone isn’t slated to come to Canada any time soon, nor are some of its other unique technological advances, but elsewhere in the world, the company is pushing the industry forward with a number of interesting innovations.

For example, Domino’s envisions a future where the company takes advantage of Microsoft’s Bot Framework, a system designed to help people build and connect intelligent bots and one of Build 2016’s more significant surprises. Thankfully, while this pizza ordering tech is powered by the same technology behind Tay, the tech giant’s first experimental AI chat that unfortunately went on a racist tirade thanks to mischievous Twitter users, Domino’s obviously has a very specific use case in mind

Hungry for a pineapple, three-cheese pizza with a thin crust? Don’t even bother picking up the phone or an app. Log into a chat platform like Slack or Facebook Messenger and tell a brand-specific bot exactly what you want. That bot will place the order for you, and all you had to do was send the equivalent of a text.

Pizza in 3 minutes and delivery in 10

Domino’s also has ambitions to get pizza to its customers faster than ever before, especially in Australia. The initiative, amusing labelled “Project 3:10,” aims to cook a custom made pizza in just 3 minutes, with specially manufactured smart ovens that utilize convection and radiant heat in order to cook and deliver that scrumptious pizza delight in just 10 minutes. In comparison, “dumb” ovens have the ability to cook a pizza in approximately seven minutes and 15 seconds.

While this sounds like science fiction, this is exactly the framework Domino’s is rolling out across stores in Australia and New Zealand. By 2019 the company hopes to have more than 850 locations in this region operating within these parameters. Combined with drone delivery, that 10 minute delivery time doesn’t seem unreasonable, either.

Japan is expected to be Dominos next “3:10” pizza cooking region. There isn’t any word yet on if Dominos also plans to eventually bring the technology to Canada.