The Secret Dominos Doesn’t Want You to Know About

Domino’s may be known for its delicious pizzas and its delivery service, but the chain is reportedly hiding a very big secret regarding one of its most popular features: the Domino’s Pizza Tracker. The tracker, which appears after one places an order, allows guests to track their order from the moment it is placed, to when it goes into the oven, gets a quality check, and is on the way to your door, and while fans have long depended on that tracker to keep up-to-date with the status of their mouth-watering pizza, it turns out the infamous Domino’s Pizza Tracker isn’t very accurate at all.

Wanting to get down to the bottom of the accuracy of the tracker, Brian VanHooker, a writer for Mel Magazine, put the Domino’s Pizza Tracker to the test. To do this, VanHooker placed an order for delivery while staking out at his local Domino’s restaurant, allowing him to “compare each progress mark on the tracker with what’s actually happening with my pizza.” When the order was ready to head to his house, VanHooker jumped in his car to follow the delivery guy. VanHooker admitted, “I’m going into this hoping that the pizza tracker is not in fact a lie, but I’ll be honest, I do have my suspicions, so I plan to get to the bottom of this hunch.”

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The test began at 6:45 p.m. when VanHooker arrived at the restaurant. After placing his order for a half plain, half Hawaiian pan pizza at 6:55 p.m. via the app, the test was put in motion when the Domino’s Pizza Tracker appeared, accidently confirming that the order had been placed. VanHooker wrote that after placing his order, he noticed “my order appear on the order screen behind the counter for the pizza makers.” Unfortunately, it was all downhill for the Domino’s Pizza Tracker from there.

When the tracker updated to “We’re firing it up” at 6:56 p.m., VanHooker wrote that “despite this notification, I see no signs that my pizza is being made,” delacring that he has “UNCOVERED THE FIRST LIE.” While his order was marked as “in the oven” just minutes later, VanHooker said he saw one of this happen. From what I can tell, my order hasn’t even been assembled yet, much less already baking in the oven.” It is only at 7:06 p.m. that VanHooker saw an employee beginning to make his pizza. Just a minute after he saw his pizza go into the oven, the tracker inaccurately said the pizza had undergone a “perfection check,” then when the tracker changed to “we’re on the way” at 7:14 p.m., VanHooker noted, “Nope! My pizza is still in the oven. In fact, I can just begin to see it peeking through the other side on the conveyor belt.” VanHooker’s pizza didn’t make it to his house until 7:36 p.m., though the tracker didn’t reflect this until 7:45 p.m.

In the end, VanHook noted that while “the Domino’s Pizza Tracker was only off by a few minutes… t was pretty clear that the progress bar was in no way related to what was actually going on.” VanHooker suggested that the Domino’s Pizza Tracker instead appears to be “a pre-timed estimate of how long each step should take, but in no way is it customized for your order.”