It’s a far cry from the old days, when the recipe for success in the pizza biz was simple: take some dough, top it with sauce and cheese, bake it–and watch the profits roll in. Now the once piping-hot, $21 billion industry has cooled, leaving chains like Pizza Hut, Domino’s and Little Caesars in a vicious fight for market share. To grow their slice of the pie, and to fend off competition from upstart “gourmet” pizza peddlers like California Pizza Kitchen, they’ve embarked on a quest to reinvent the venerable dish. Pizza Hut racked up millions last year serving its latest innovations, Stuffed Crust and Triple Decker. And Michael Ilitch, chief executive of Little Caesars, spends much of his time in the kitchen testing such products as Sports Pizza. That football-shaped pie, introduced last month, is but one attempt to come up with “breakthrough ideas [that] get people into our stores,” explains Little Caesars’ marketing chief, Phil Roos.
No one generates breakthroughs like Al Rose. Last month Domino’s began a $10 million ad blitz touting his latest: Gar- lic Crunch, a pungent pizza with peppers, onions and you-know-what baked into the dough. (A hit could boost sales 10 percent, analysts predict.) But for every innovation that crosses a customer’s doorstep, there are hundreds of failures. In the test kitchen recently, he cooked up a few for NEWSWEEK. Take Turkey Pizza, slathered with gravy and stuffing. Tastes great, but it didn’t fly with focus groups. Then there’s Apple Pie Pizza, a dessert. Yum, testers told him, but who wants to chase a pizza with pizza? “Deliverability issues” sank Taco Pizza, made with refried beans, lettuce and tomato. (Twenty minutes in a hot box wilts the veggies.) Even Rose’s favorite, BBQ Pizza, fizzled too. “If you can’t sell people on the concept, you can’t sell them the pizza, no matter how phenomenal it is,” he says sadly.
When he’s not shnorking pizzas, Rose tinkers with sauces. (He tested three dozen variations last year alone.) Occasionally he attends academic conferences on topics dear to his heart–say, dough fermentation. Is he hefty, the side effect of eating 1,000 slices a year? Surprisingly, no. Rose weighs just 160 pounds, and his cholesterol is a healthy 145. It could be good genes. Or maybe it’s the amount of brain energy this mad genius expends dreaming of pizzas that never were and asking, “Why not?”
