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I blame the evolution of pizza cheese for killing my love of pizza. Until about 1990, Dominos Pizza was a taste to die for, partly due to a flavorful sauce tha

I blame the evolution of pizza cheese for killing my love of pizza. Until about 1990, Dominos Pizza was a taste to die for, partly due to a flavorful sauce that wasn't too sweet or acidic, but mostly due to a brilliant mix of cheeses that weren't too oily yet left me intoxicated with gustatory delight. I loved it so much that at one point, I dined at Dominos every day for a week straight. (And since they didn't deliver to my neighborhood, I drove to the closest shop and ate in my car. In a Maryland winter.) Presumably unsatisfied with market share or cost, in about 1990 the beancounters at Dominos decided to rejigger the cheese unto blandness while deliberately poisoning the sauce; their pizza became, in a word, vile. I suspect the new formula saved the company 50 cents per pizza, but it lost me as a customer for 20 years. The sauce formula changed again around 2005 (IIRC) to cause less projectile vomiting IMHO, but their mix of cheese never recovered. Today's Dominos Pizza is but a winsome shadow of what it was in those great early days when the company grew without bounds and the brand was almost eponymous with their one and only product, pizza. Today, while pizza cheese is widely dissed for its pedestrian lack of flavor and oversmoothed texture, once upon a time, it was something much much more.

tails4e 5y ago
This is the same thing that happens to so many companies, and I blame Wall Street, and the growth at all costs mentality. We all know rationally that continuous growth is impossible, yet its what wallstreet and bean counters demand. Cadburys chocolate, used to be lovely, yet now its been cheapened. I'd love to see how much the new formula saves, and I'd bet it's not huge, but I buy a lot less because of it. Nett loss long term, but short term gain for a few quarters I'm sure. Why isn't being profitable, and sustainable behaviour rewarded? It's because volatility drives wall street, so they force companies to act for short term gains and effectively, irrationally.
- alblue 5y ago
  Cadbury’s chocolate used to be a British company (having started in the Bourneville area of Birmingham in the UK) but was taken over in 2010 by Kraft, the American makers of spray-on cheese from a deodorant bottle. The problem is that American chocolate is something of the worst in the world, and so there’s no doubt that the (cocoa) bean counters negatively affected the Cadbury brand and taste in order to shave off a few cents. https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2019-opinion-cadbury/ https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2019-opinion-cadbury/

tails4e 5y ago

This is the same thing that happens to so many companies, and I blame Wall Street, and the growth at all costs mentality. We all know rationally that continuous growth is impossible, yet its what wallstreet and bean counters demand. Cadburys chocolate, used to be lovely, yet now its been cheapened. I'd love to see how much the new formula saves, and I'd bet it's not huge, but I buy a lot less because of it. Nett loss long term, but short term gain for a few quarters I'm sure. Why isn't being profitable, and sustainable behaviour rewarded? It's because volatility drives wall street, so they force companies to act for short term gains and effectively, irrationally.

alblue 5y ago
Cadbury’s chocolate used to be a British company (having started in the Bourneville area of Birmingham in the UK) but was taken over in 2010 by Kraft, the American makers of spray-on cheese from a deodorant bottle. The problem is that American chocolate is something of the worst in the world, and so there’s no doubt that the (cocoa) bean counters negatively affected the Cadbury brand and taste in order to shave off a few cents. https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2019-opinion-cadbury/ https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2019-opinion-cadbury/