Pizza Hut Plans Delivery Hiring Binge

Food delivery is one of the great hallmarks of restaurant-based mobile payment systems, a natural outcropping of mobile payment and mobile order-ahead systems. After all, once you’ve placed the order and paid for it, you’ve got to actually get the food somehow. Pizza Hut, meanwhile, is focusing on the delivery side of things, with plans to hire a hefty new lineup of drivers and augment its delivery technology to help speed things up.

The big news is that Pizza Hut is planning to hire 3,000 new drivers a month for every month left in 2017. That’s somewhere around 15,000 to 18,000, depending on whether or not they count this month in the equation. A great start—reports suggest there are only 15,000 locations worldwide, and since this is just the United States, it’s a safe bet driver opportunities will open up most everywhere—but it gets better from there.

That’s a good start—got to have the wheels on the ground, so to speak—but it gets better. Pizza Hut isn’t just throwing warm bodies at the problem; it’s also augmenting its delivery network with a new algorithm designed to improve delivery processes.

Optimistic perhaps, but not without some merit. Pizza Hut has been one of the leading figures in chain pizza in the United States for decades, but it’s also faced a lot of competition. Between chains like Domino’s and Papa John’s as well as a staggering array of local competitors, Pizza Hut’s primacy in the field has been under constant challenge and even occasional loss.

But Pizza Hut’s embrace of new technologies—I routinely order Pizza Hut online, and considering the company actually rolled out a kind of footwear that could be used for online orders, it’s obvious the company’s been keeping up with technology—is a point in its favor. Say what you will about its pizza, it’s certainly not poised to fall behind its competitors in technological development.

If drones are ever legalized, I expect Pizza Hut will have flying pizza all over the country within days. Pizza Hut has made it clear that its overall corporate strategy is technology-driven, and its new fleet of delivery drivers and delivery algorithm are clear demonstrations of plans to keep up, and lead where possible.