For Domino’s, responsible sourcing means acknowledging the role we play in driving innovation and supplier partnerships to provide the highest quality and safest food possible. We are doing this through our efforts around packaging sustainability, carbon footprint reduction, enhancing animal care standards, and transparency with nutrition and ingredient information.
Sustainable Packaging
Nearly everything that leaves a Domino’s store leaves in the same type of packaging: corrugated cardboard boxes. Domino’s currently has two corrugated box suppliers, each of which provide boxes made from more than 70% recycled content. Both box suppliers maintain certified fiber sourcing and chain-of custody certifications using third-party audits.
Deforestation
Domino’s is proud to report over 90% of the products sold in the United States come from domestic suppliers, and that the majority of our dairy and meat suppliers source their feed from domestic sources. We are pleased that the vast majority of our sourcing choices to-date have resulted in few ingredients sourced from origins with high conversion and deforestation risk.
Our Science Based Targets initiative application, currently being validated, includes FLAG (food, land, and agriculture) targets, which are new standards for measuring land-related emissions. Deforestation and land-use change are a large contributor to carbon emissions. Domino’s FLAG-compliant targets represent an important step in managing the deforestation impacts from our supply chain.
Palm Oil
While palm oil represents one of Domino’s ingredients that has the highest potential impact on deforestation, our supply chain team has taken extra steps to reduce the risk of impact. We are proud to say that Domino’s is a member of the Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO). As such, we are committed to sourcing palm oil that is produced without deforestation of high conservation value areas, high carbon stock forests or the destruction of peat land. Domino’s sources 100% certified sustainable mass balance palm oil product used in our pan pizza dough and bread sides and has for many years achieved our goal of 100% traceability back to the mill for this product. We continue to require that our supplier remain a member in good standing of the RSPO.
Other ingredients that may have deforestation risk are being evaluated and assessed to ensure alignment to our deforestation commitment.
Animal Care
Domino’s requires that all suppliers comply with USDA regulations on the humane treatment of animals as a baseline for all animal care. It’s important to highlight that Domino’s does not own, raise, transport or process the animals used for our products. Domino’s purchases pork, beef and poultry ingredients from suppliers who obtain their products from farmers and ranchers who raise and care for their animals in compliance with local, state, and federal guidelines, industry best practices and the support of farm animal veterinarians. Domino’s has published our animal care principles and continues on a path towards creating an animal care policy for applicable suppliers.
Domino’s supports the “Five Freedoms” as endorsed by the World Organization for Animal Health:
- Freedom from thirst
- Freedom from fear and distress
- Freedom from physical and thermal discomfort
- Freedom from pain, injury and disease
- Freedom to express normal patterns of behavior
We support the efforts of the dairy industry, at farms both large and small, to use best management practices as outlined by the National Dairy Farmers Organization in the Farmers Assuring Responsible Management (FARM) program. Our animal care principles can be found in our reporting library.
Antibiotics
We care about the food we serve to customers and our families, and we want it to be safe. We also support the care and wellbeing of animals, including those who are sick and may require antibiotics to become well. We believe that farmers and veterinarians that treat sick animals and prevent the spread of disease should be able to. We recognize that the use of antibiotics in farm animals may lead to antibiotic resistance in humans, which could prove to be a larger threat to human health, a threat that we aim to help reduce by working alongside our suppliers on this topic.
No meat in the U.S. food supply can have antibiotic residue in it when it is sold to the public. The FDA in recent years has enacted regulations that we are happy to support, including rules around what kind of antibiotics farmers can use and when they can use them.
Chicken
We are pleased to report that 100% of our chicken used for pizzas, sandwiches, wings, boneless chicken and pasta are raised without antibiotics that are medically important to humans. We do not purchase products from broiler chickens raised with fluoroquinolones or steroids.
Pork and Beef
Although the poultry industry has reacted rapidly to providing new antibiotic protocols, it is not quite as straightforward or easy in the production of pork and beef. We believe that the pork and beef industries have made a considerable amount of progress. However, for us to consider antibiotic restrictions in the pork and beef we purchase, there is much more work that needs to be done before the amount of available supply is accessible by suppliers that meet Domino’s requirements. Specifically, we intend to transition to pork and beef sourced from animals raised without the routine use of medically important antibiotics for disease prevention purposes once a sufficient supply of such pork and beef is available in the U.S. market. This needs to come from suppliers who satisfy our food safety, quality, cost and other product standards, and who can demonstrate their ability to reliably source and distribute these products with appropriate business continuity measures.
The Company supports the humane treatment of animals and will continue to exert the influence we have with the U.S. pork industry to maximize the time that pregnant sows spend in group housing, away from gestation crates. The Company does not, however, own, raise, transport or process the animals used for our products. As such, we are limited by the supply available to us, as we have limited influence based on our size and volume of pork purchased, and we believe this is an issue that should be addressed directly with producers and suppliers, not customers.
The Company commends efforts to eliminate gestation crate usage in the restaurant industry. However, when considering the specific product requirements of the pizza industry, the Company’s current products are not compatible with the current supply and availability of group-housed pork and only a fraction of the trims the Company purchases from its suppliers are currently able to be sourced from group-housed pork options. While the Company continues to assess how its blended meat ingredients may be ultimately transitioned, the Company has taken measures to source from suppliers utilizing group housing and is pleased that over 50% of the bacon currently distributed in its supply chain is group housing compliant. The livestock industry continues to increase the number of animals raised without the usage of gestation crates, but the transition is not complete. As the demand for group-housed pork grows and as additional legislation regarding gestation crates is passed, we expect the percentage of sows spending the majority of their lives in group housing to continue to grow as producers balance consumer demand, animal welfare concerns, and land and resource constraints.
The Company reiterates its commitment to purchasing group-housed pork if and when it determines that a sufficient supply of such pork is available within the supply chain that meets the Company’s quality assurance and product continuity standards. Until that time, the Company requires flexibility to continue to make quality and value-oriented food for our customers and reliably source products within its supply chain to ensure appropriate business continuity while continuing to prioritize the well-being of the businesses of our independent franchisees in the U.S. We remain committed to continue complying with all applicable laws and regulations governing our operations — and requiring the same of our suppliers — including any future laws and regulations imposing stricter or more specific requirements on gestation crates or otherwise. We also remain committed to improving animal welfare throughout our supply chain where possible and will continue to evaluate the pork supply chain and the Company’s pork supply commitments in light of the availability of supply that meets the Company’s specific product needs and business objectives.
Food Safety
Domino’s food safety and quality assurance, supply chain and operations teams prioritize food safety and product quality from farm-to-customer. We work closely with our suppliers, supply chain centers and restaurants to ensure that our customers can continue to trust us for safe and high-quality food.
Our food safety and quality assurance and procurement teams maintain great relationships with our ingredient and packaging suppliers. We verify supplier food safety certifications in the U.S., Canada and around the world, and in the spirit of ongoing improvement, we will continue to raise food safety expectations for suppliers around the world. Domino’s supply chain centers produce fresh dough and distribute more than 240 other products to our restaurants across the U.S. and Canada multiple times per week. Our supply chain center employees receive relevant food safety training, and in addition to frequent state and local regulatory inspections, we leverage a certified inspector to conduct food safety audits at each supply chain center. Additionally, suppliers are expected to adhere to our Supplier Code of Conduct which outlines additional human rights, environmental, integrity and food safety expectations.
Domino’s leverages both internal and third-party food safety experts to provide enhanced food safety training to restaurant employees and to conduct annual unannounced food safety evaluations at our stores around the world with a focus on building and sustaining a strong food safety culture. Through rigorous data analysis, we leverage technology to drive key insights to establish improvement opportunities. We also capture and investigate store and consumer complaints as an added layer to understand and maintain food safety and quality expectations.
Transparency is an important component of trust, and we provide our entire ingredient and allergen list for the products Domino’s sells online. We also provide a nutrition calculator on dominos.com that can provide full nutrition information on the millions of combinations of products on our menu.
To further raise the bar on a global scale, we are designing a corporate quality assurance & food safety governance audit that will be used to further build international master franchisees’ capabilities and enable best practice sharing across the 90+ countries with Domino’s restaurants.