Red Robin's New Pizza Has This Major Issue, Customers Say
Updated on June 21: Red Robin reached out to Eat This, Not That! following the publication of this article with the following statement:
"We found out over the weekend that Red Robin was really popular on Reddit, but for all the wrong reasons. Thanks to Reddit user CongressmanCoolRick, we fixed the customization for ordering Donatos pizza online. So whether you want pizza with just crust and pepperoni, or extra cheese and sauce… slice it up however you want."
Pizza became the most-ordered food during the pandemic, and a lot of restaurants want in on the action. Curiously, customers of Red Robin—which just announced a permanent partnership with a national pizza chain—have taken to an online forum to point out an awkward issue with the pizza Red Robin currently serves.
On Friday, the Colorado-based Red Robin Gourmet Burgers, Inc. announced that "After much success in early launch markets," they had "grand plans" to expand their partnership with Donato's Pizza "as part of an aggressive market expansion." Red Robin and Donato's first executed this collab in 2018, with Donato's Pizza currently available at approximately 80 Red Robin locations, according to the press release. The expansion will bring Donato's Pizza into 120 more Red Robin restaurants in Idaho, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Maryland, Virginia, and California by the end of this year.
However, with all this growth teed up between Red Robin and Donato's, it sounds as though there's a detail in their present product that the two have overlooked.
On Saturday, one Red Robin customer, u/CongressmanCoolRick, took to Reddit to reveal a problem with an online pizza order for which the custom request appears to have been extra pepperoni: "Red Robin has pizza now, but when you customize the order it defaults to no cheese and no sauce." To add a woe that so many people can relate to, he added: "I didn't notice it until I got home from curbside pickup."
With almost 52,000 upvotes and 2,000 comments and growing, thousands of Redditors agree that this Red Robin pizza definitely does not look like what you might anticipate when you submit your order online. StupidStu187 said, "I worked at Pizza Hut during high school and when I'd come home from college on break. Every now and then we'd get an order for a pizza with no cheese OR no sauce, but never without both."
Bear4188 said, "Worked at a pizza place in the kitchen. Plenty of no sauce or no cheese. Never a no sauce and no cheese."
Others noted that for allergy or other dietary reasons, they do customize their orders this way… but the general consensus is that indeed, this is a bug in the system that Red Robin might want to look into before they go bigger with their pizza push—as u/FreddyCroug noted: "Employees must think all the weirdos order pizza from Red Robin when they keep making these without cheese and sauce."
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