Pizza Marketplace Podcast

Dodo Pizza’s playbook for international success

In this Pizza Marketplace podcast, executives from Dodo Brands discuss how the company uses its proprietary technology platform and a balance of global operational standards with local market customization to fuel the international expansion of both Dodo Pizza and its digital coffee concept, Drink It.

July 15, 2026

In this episode of the Pizza Marketplace podcast, host Mandy Detwiler, editor of Pizza Marketplace, chats with Ilya Kholodnov, head of international marketing and sales for Dodo Pizza, and David Sweeney, champion of international franchising for Dodo Pizza, The brand was founded in Russia but is headquartered in Kazakhstan.

Dodo Pizza has 1,500 stores and revenue of nearly $2 billion. It's sister company, Drink It, a coffee concept, has 150 stores in five countries.

Sweeney attributes the brand's strong sales to its customer service. "I think the key thing is to have a really good customer experience to allow the technology or the technology should enable us to have a really good customer experience because we really look after the customer, make it easy to transact business, make sure the order is easy to place, that there is good variety, but not so much that confuses everybody. Make sure that when the order arrives into our stores, that order is processed in a way that is accurate and then it's timely and priced at roughly the right level for it to be at for the consumer to accept it as a really good value product and for it to arrive on time, hot and the order to be accurate. So the systems enable all of that to happen."

Why did a pizza brand move into coffee?

"Coffee was actually quite a logical step," Kholodnov said. "So maybe during conversation, you'll find out that our business is based on tech platform. And so it was very logical when we built a strong platform to scale franchise businesses, it was logical to add something more to that. So coffee seemed like a logical step to us."

To learn more about Dodo Pizza's international operations, growth and foray into the coffee business, listen to the podcast in its entirety.