The Domino’s effect: The pizza giant refuses to phase out inhumane pork

Domino’s wants to be different. The company — once known for crap-tastic pizza and mediocre ad campaigns — has struggled in recent years to remake its image with an ironic campaign that admitted to poor quality followed by an effort to incorporate so-called “artisan toppings.”

Domino’s has been doing so much to reach out to food-conscious customers, says Kristie Middleton, outreach manager at the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), that she’s surprised by its latest move — a decision to continue serving pork from pigs raised in gestation crates. “It seems like it would only make sense to include an animal welfare tenet as part of their rebranding,” she says.

Instead, it looks like Domino’s has other allies, including the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF), an organization known for its staunch support of industrial agriculture and factory farming. In fact, this week AFBF came right out and endorsed Domino’s decision, complete with a photo of a sausage-covered pizza on the front page of its national website.

Domino’s is getting the royal treatment from AFBF because it’s one of very few holdouts, as the last six months have seen an avalanche of announcements by businesses including Burger King, McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Denny’s, Carl’s Jr., Safeway, and Hormel (the maker of Spam), which have all expressed the intention to move away from gestation crates. Even Smithfield Foods — the nation’s largest pork producer — has agreed to phase out the crates by 2017. Eight states have also banned the practice, including Michigan, home to the Domino’s headquarters. (The chain’s top supplier is Tyson Foods, a company that has shown no interest in following the trend away from crates — and has even recently been in the news for continuing to embrace the practice.)

The crates, or cages, are used to confine between 60 and 70 percent of breeding sows in this country, and animal behavior expert Temple Grandin describes them as the equivalent of “asking a sow to live in an airline seat” (without lavatory privileges, mind you).