Domino's using GPS to track pick-up customers

From Monday Domino's will ask its pick-up customers to share their location data so the pizza chain can work out the optimum time to start cooking their order.

The DRU delivery robot.

The company made the announcement today as part of its first 'Abacus' event in a six-month series of updates on Domino's innovation initiatives.

'On-time cooking' will ask customers at the point of order to grant Domino's authorisation to access their device's GPS data to determine the customer's location.

It will be used to track when the pick-up customer enters the "cook zone" - a four-minute radius around their chosen store - to ensure their pizza order is just out of the oven when they come to collect it.

Domino's CEO Don Meij said the pizza chain currently had no way of telling when the between 50-60 percent of customers that order pick-up are actually going to arrive in store.

Domino's has two separate methods for tracking mobile and desktop customers, chief digital officer Michael Gillespie said.

"On mobile, customers give us permission for what we need for the duration of the ordering experience. Therefore we know where they are when they're placing the order, we know the distance from the store, we then ask what method they are using to get to the store," Gillespie said.

"When we know how they are getting to the store and their distance from the store we can calculate their time, and if they're outside the cook zone, we'll wait until they enter it .. and then start cooking their order.

"If you're on a desktop and you don't want your location tracked, you just want us to know where you're leaving from, we've got algorithms that will take control and tell us how long it will take the customer to arrive at the store, what the cook time is, and we'll start cooking it when we believe you'll be four minutes away."

Gillespie stressed the feature was opt-in and would only work with a customer's consent.

"When people accept [the feature], they can view the terms and conditions at any time, we're fully transparent on that. We're only using that data for that experience and only holding it for that experience," he said.

The feature will launch on Monday within Domino's mobile and online ordering application. Meij said it would be expanded globally following the Australian rollout.

The pizza chain also today unveiled its plan for "zero-click" ordering - a standalone mobile application that will automatically place an order for the last pizza a customer purchased unless the user selects another option within ten seconds.

The Domino's DRU pizza robot, first announced in March, will likely go live in New Zealand within the next 12 months, Meij said. The company is still working with Australian regulatory authorities on getting the delivery robot on the country's roads and footpaths.