How Pizza Hut and In-N-Out are winning the fast food brand war
While Domino’s has turned into a soulless tech corporation, Pizza Hut is going back to what made people love it. In this clip from You’re Not the Audience, Parliament Creative Director Calvin Ross Carl explains how Pizza Hut Classic, with its red roofs, Tiffany-style lamps, and salad bars, weaponizes nostalgia to carve out a distinct space. He also looks at In-N-Out, which has turned itself into the essential California experience through consistency, service, and secret-menu world building, and asks whether that promise can hold up as the chain expands beyond California. It’s from the You’re Not the Audience episode on fast food brands, The Grayification of Fast Food Brands.
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Outline
Summary
Calvin Ross Carl turns to the fast food brands doing it right. Domino’s has become a soulless tech company, with a clever pizza tracker but a sad in-store experience. Pizza Hut, after years of trying to meet Domino’s on efficiency, has started bringing back Pizza Hut Classic, recreating the restaurants people remember with red roofs, Tiffany-style lamps, tablecloths, and salad bars.
Calvin calls it a heritage play that weaponizes nostalgia: rather than reimagining the brand, Pizza Hut is mining its history and cleaning it up. He points to a New York Times feature photographed by Noah Kalina and the joy of something as unglamorous as a salad bar when you’re there with family.
He then praises In-N-Out’s consistent look, good ingredients, well-paid staff, and if-you-know-you-know secret menu, which together make it the essential California experience. The open question is whether that identity holds as In-N-Out expands into places like Portland and Vancouver, Washington.
Highlights
Domino’s optimized away the joy of its in-store experience.
Pizza Hut Classic brings back red roofs, Tiffany-style lamps, and salad bars.
Pizza Hut stopped competing with Domino’s on efficiency and chose distinction.
In-N-Out has made itself the essential California experience.
Expansion beyond California could test In-N-Out’s identity.
Key insights
Don’t meet competitors at parity
Pizza Hut couldn’t win by out-efficiency-ing Domino’s. Going back to what people think of as a pizzeria let it carve its own space.
Heritage is already built
The red roof is such a unique building shape that Calvin finds it insane Pizza Hut ever stopped doubling down on it.
Service is part of the brand
In-N-Out pays people well, keeps screens out, and even gets staff to happily wear paper hats, which shows a company doing something right.
Growth can strain a promise
The further In-N-Out expands, the harder it becomes to claim a local, mom-and-pop California experience.
Detailed analysis
The clip offers two models of standing out in a category racing toward efficiency. Pizza Hut wins by reviving its own past, while In-N-Out wins by never abandoning its consistency, service, and world building in the first place.
Calvin’s caution about In-N-Out’s expansion is a reminder that a strong brand promise can be tested by success. If it keeps the service, local food, happy employees, and secret menu, it can own a California attitude even in other states.
Conclusion
Let the other brands become boring tech companies, Calvin says. The fast food brands that combine heritage, customer service, and joy are the ones that get to stand apart.
Transcript
Okay, so who’s doing it right? We’ve got—there also said Pizza Hut. Oh, I’ve got Pizza Hut in here. I think Pizza Hut is doing some incredible stuff right now. So, Pizza Hut. Pizza Hut sucked for a long time. It probably still sucks. I don’t know. People have preferences in the great fight and battle between Domino’s and Pizza Hut.
Domino’s has fully become a soulless tech corporation. I think maybe you can do this at Pizza Hut too, but you can even see a tracker of where your pizza is in the cooking process. Honestly, kind of awesome. But then you go into a Domino’s and it is just the saddest experience. You just go pick it up, they hand it to you, missing all those points of joy that they could be having.
But Pizza Hut—Pizza Hut started a recent thing. I think I’ve got some stuff open here. Pizza Hut recently started bringing back Pizza Hut Classic. And Pizza Hut Classic is them just going back to what they did. This is that heritage play I was talking about. This is them weaponizing nostalgia. So they’ve started recreating the classic Pizza Huts that we all remember: the building, the Tiffany-style lamps, the tablecloths. All of those little details make up this bigger world that we love at Pizza Hut. And it’s been so good. I think there’s 100 or 200 of these Pizza Huts now. None on the West Coast, unfortunately.
But they’ve started bringing back the classic red roof that looks like the Pizza Hut that we all know. There’s even this great New York Times article about it, showing really nice interiors. I think these were all shot by Noah Kalina, too, which is a charming thing if you’re of a certain 2000s era of tech nerd and photography nerd. We all know Noah Kalina. And they’ve brought back these classic old photos. I think this right here is absolute peak fast food brand, because we don’t think of pizza as fast food a lot, but it absolutely is. And they’re doing it right in every way. They’re mining their history. They aren’t doing anything crazy. They’re not like, let’s reimagine it. No. They’re like, let’s just take what made us popular, what everyone thinks of, and clean it up and do it right. And it’s absolutely incredible how they’re doing it. They’ve even got the salad bar. And I mean, who doesn’t love a salad bar? Let’s bring back salad bars. So I think they’re one place that’s doing it incredibly. I mean, the pizza looks fine. Sure, it’s totally fine pizza. But I think this is really smart.
There’s No Need To says, “Has it started rolling out, or is it still just talk?” It has started rolling out. They’re East Coast and Midwest. I think there’s like 150 or 100 Pizza Hut Classics somewhere in there. So they’re popping up and just haven’t made it to the West Coast yet. And honestly, I hope they do, because this is so smart of them. We often think of Domino’s and Pizza Hut in parity, because they’ve both been around a long time. They do a very similar type of product. And this is what I’m talking about, where Domino’s has gone fully tech company. They’re all about maximum efficiency: crank out pizzas, make it cheap. And at some point, Pizza Hut was trying to meet them in parity there, and it was obviously not working. So it’s time for them to carve their own space and make themselves distinct. So they went back to what we actually all think of as pizzerias. And I think they absolutely nailed it. I hope it pays off well for them. I mean, look at this. This is so great. This is what you think of when you think of Pizza Hut. So good.
Gab says, “I was missing the novelty of the buffet and salad bar with you while you’re talking about the novelty of experience.” Oh yeah. I mean, a salad bar is such a good example of an experience that, at first thought, nobody romanticizes. But then if you go to a place like this where you’re with your family, you’re with your kids, it has this kind of vibe. You are so ecstatic about a salad bar. I’m going to eat so many baby corn if I go there.
Yeah, the lights in Pizza Hut—I think they’re doing incredible. That’s great. Oh, here, I pulled this. Let me show you what the exteriors look like. It’s a great shot of the exterior. Just absolute perfection. Every Pizza Hut needs to look like that immediately. It’s such a unique shape of a building. It’s insane that they wouldn’t just keep doubling down on this, and that they haven’t for decades. And the fact they’re bringing it back is such a smart brand decision.
Okay, one other place that I think is always doing it right. We all love this place, but it’s worth talking about, and I think they’re at a point where their brand could be tested. And that is good old In-N-Out. I think In-N-Out’s great. They have a very consistent look. They always stick with it. It’s not the most thrilling-looking exterior, but you know it. They use the arrow, they use the lights, they use the little palm tree banner everywhere. So, super consistent, always good. And In-N-Out centered themselves as being, yes, just a really good, straightforward burger place. But the ingredients are good, usually local, and they kind of turned themselves into the essential California experience. If you are not from California and you go there, you know you have to get In-N-Out. They have consciously doubled down on that. It is the California burger joint.
And so I think they’re always doing incredible. They pay their people well. They understand the power of service. Everyone is super nice, generous. As far as I know, no screens have shown up at In-N-Out Burgers. Please, dear God, do not correct me on that. I don’t want to think that’s a possibility.
But I think one challenge that In-N-Out faces right now is that they are expanding beyond California. They’ve started popping up here around Portland. They’re going a little bit outside of their region, and I’m curious what that does. Oh, Aaron says they don’t seem to mind wearing the paper hats. I mean, if you can convince your employees to wear those paper hats and everyone seems joyous while you’re there, impressive. That means you’re doing something right as a company.
So yeah, In-N-Out is expanding beyond the region that they have kind of claimed, and I’m curious to see how they handle that as a brand, where we are the essential California experience in Portland, Oregon. Does that translate? And so I think they’re going to have a little bit of an inflection point of, are we actually who we say we are? And the more they expand, it also starts cutting into this idea that they’re like a mom-and-pop large fast food chain, and that they can use local ingredients, and all of that stuff starts coming into question.
Sarah says, “We long to pretend we’re in California.” I mean, dear God, most of the year in Portland, I definitely dream of being in California. That sounds much nicer than the gray here.
But I do think there is something about that. If they tap into that and keep doing it—provide the service, keep the food local, keep your employees happy, bring those moments of joy, keep the secret menu items. That is a huge part of the world building of In-N-Out, that they have that whole if-you-know-you-know kind of aspect. And if they can communicate this idea that you are getting this classic California drive-in experience, and they can do that in other states, they win. And I think they create such a huge market for themselves if they just keep focusing on that. Let all the other brands become boring tech companies, and they get to then own a California attitude with customer service and joy combined in. So I think they’re doing it great. I think they could have some challenges coming up.
This is also a reminder to me how long it’s been since I have had an In-N-Out burger. All of us at Parliament just went down to San Francisco a couple weeks ago for our meetings with Netlify, our very nice clients down there. I don’t know what the state of In-N-Out in San Francisco is. Oh, I guess there’s one down on the Embarcadero or something like that, or somewhere down there. I think I’ve gotten the full San Francisco experience by walking from an In-N-Out into a Blue Bottle. I think that’s all you need to do to experience all of San Francisco now, right?
Oh, Sarah says, “Birthday lunch for me today. Apparently they have an In-N-Out in Vancouver, Washington.” See, it’s hard. I’m not going to lie, it’s hard to be like, you’re going to have this essential California experience in Vancouver, Washington. Knockoff of Vancouver, BC. But okay.