Dodo Markalarının Küresel Hedefleri Daha Yeni Başlıyor

Dodo Brands’ Global Ambitions Are Just Getting Started

Ben Coley

Fri, August 21, 2026 at 2:19 PM GMT+3 7 min read

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After getting a feel for the pizza business at a Papa Johns store in St. Petersburg, Russia, entrepreneur Fyodor Ovchinnikov headed north and opened the first Dodo Pizza in 2011 in Syktyvkar, a small city far from the country's major restaurant hubs. The setup was about as humble as it gets—a cramped basement, delivery only—but Ovchinnikov chronicled every step of it publicly, blogging openly about the wins, the stumbles, and everything in between.

Fast forward 15 years, and Dodo is no longer a scrappy experiment. What started in that basement grew into Russia's number one pizza chain within just a few years, and today Dodo Pizza ranks among the fastest-growing pizza brands in the world.

"We were dreamers from day one," says Dmitry Soloviev, CEO of Dodo Brands, the parent company behind Dodo Pizza as well as the digital-first coffee chain Drinkit. "Our goal was always to build a big international company."

Soloviev joined Dodo in 2018 as CFO, was promoted to CEO of the brand's three largest markets in 2022, and in 2024 took the helm of the entire holding company. Today he oversees a business that has grown to nearly 1,700 locations across 26 countries.

Two years ago, Dodo Pizza crossed $1 billion in annual sales for the first time. Last year it posted $1.6 billion and added close to 300 stores, while entering four new markets—Qatar, Mongolia, Montenegro, and Spain—and signing master franchise agreements in Mexico, Morocco, Iraq, and Hungary.

Drinkit, the company's newer coffee concept, now has just over 200 units across four markets, including a recent entry into Azerbaijan, with a launch in Qatar on the way. Combined, the group's systemwide revenue exceeded $1.8 billion in 2025, a 22 percent year-over-year increase.

It's a serious footprint for a company that still thinks of itself, in some ways, as just getting started.

"We're the youngest pizza brand globally," Soloviev says, "and we're the only big pizza brand that was born in the 21st century."

That 21st-century DNA shows up most clearly in how Dodo thinks about technology: not as a tool bolted onto the restaurant business, but as the foundation it's built on. At the center of that foundation is Dodo IS, the company's proprietary, cloud-based operating platform, developed and maintained by an in-house team of roughly 300 engineers.

The system functions as an all-in-one digital operating system for every unit in the network, covering kitchen operations, order management, delivery logistics, inventory, labor, business analytics, and franchise performance monitoring. In the kitchen, it replaces paper tickets with tablets, coordinates workflows, and tracks preparation times to the second. On the customer side, it manages ordering across the website, mobile app, and in-store kiosks, and gives guests real-time visibility into when their order will arrive. For franchisees overseeing multiple locations, it allows centralized performance monitoring and cross-store benchmarking from a single dashboard. The platform is provided to franchise partners at no additional cost, and because it's built on a modular, cloud-first architecture, third-party developers can build add-ons and integrations through a Dodo IS Marketplace.

"We started developing it and integrating it into our system on day one," Soloviev says. "It was something that made us different from our competitors on both the national level and the international level."

Each year the company invests millions of dollars into maintaining and evolving the platform, he adds, "so we actually consider ourselves to be 50 percent an IT company and 50 percent a pizza and coffee company."

That framing isn't just a talking point. The Dodo Pizza app now serves 9 million monthly active users. The platform is capable of handling peak loads of up to 1,040 orders per minute. And the company has been pushing the boundaries of what a restaurant tech stack can do for years—pioneering drone delivery in Russia over a decade ago, and more recently introducing an AI-powered flavor generator in its app that uses ChatGPT to combine more than 35 ingredients into over 30 million potential pizza configurations.

But the piece of the platform that may be most distinctive isn't the AI or the logistics engine. It's the transparency layer.

From the beginning, Dodo has operated on a principle of radical openness. In the early days, that meant live cameras in the kitchen so guests could watch their pizza being made in real time, and open-door policies that let customers view the kitchen and check conditions for themselves. Those moves were consistent with the spirit Ovchinnikov established when he was blogging about his failures before the company had any real traction.

"Then we just extrapolated this concept of transparency to our financial data and made that transparent as well," Soloviev says.

Today, Dodo publishes real-time sales figures for every unit in its system directly on its website. The data is available store by store and visible to anyone who wants to look. That level of openness is one of the most powerful tools in the company's franchise development arsenal, says Ilya Kholodnov, Dodo's head of franchise sales and marketing

"The question in the franchising world is whether the franchise really is what it pitches itself and promises itself to be in the shiny brochure," he says. "When you can just go to the website and see the sales of each particular store, you really trust the brand. You trust the operation and the efficiency that it has."

Dodo has taken many of the same ideas behind Dodo Pizza and applied them to Drinkit, the digital-first coffee concept it launched in 2020. The chain, which now has more than 200 locations across four markets, strips much of the traditional friction out of the coffee experience. Customers order through the Drinkit app or self-service kiosks, customize drinks down to temperature and espresso strength, and track orders through digital pickup systems rather than waiting in line. The platform includes an AI-powered assistant that can recommend drinks based on a customer's mood and preferences.

Looking ahead, Dodo Brands plans to open more than 400 restaurants globally in 2026 as it works toward a long-term goal of 4,000 locations by 2030, including 3,000 Dodo Pizza units and 1,000 Drinkit stores. The company's primary growth markets include the Middle East and North Africa, Eastern Europe, Mexico, and the broader Latin American region.

The challenge going forward isn't building a system that can scale, Soloviev says. It's ensuring that the system can adapt.

Dodo's current strategy for entering new markets follows a "one partner, one country" approach, placing significant responsibility in the hands of local operators. While Dodo provides the technology, operating model, and brand standards, the company relies heavily on franchise partners to translate those systems into local success.

"In the food and beverages business, customer service is extremely important," Soloviev says. "The owner of the store is very important. He or she is the one controlling the atmosphere, the quality of service, whether the meals are tasty or not tasty. You cannot digitize everything here."

That becomes especially important as the company expands into new markets. Dodo allows meaningful localization, including menu adaptations, while trying to preserve the core elements of the brand.

"When the business expands internationally, sometimes it's hard to find the balance between your own understanding of the business and the local context," Soloviev says. "You're trying to copy everything you did in the previous country—the format, the menu, the practices. But that can be completely unclear or alien to people in other countries. On the other hand, if you let go of control completely, you dilute your brand."

His advice for operators navigating that same challenge?

"Try to find the balance between your global expertise and the local context," Soloviev says.
"That means finding the right partners and working in close cooperation with them."

As Kholodnov puts it: "Ninety percent of success is finding the right partner."

The post Dodo Brands' Global Ambitions Are Just Getting Started appeared first on QSR Magazine.