Frustrated franchisee sues Pizza Hut over crappy kitchen AI

The back-of-house AI system that Pizza Hut has mandated its restaurants to adopt has been so poorly received by some franchisees, that one is suing the company for $100 million in losses tied to the technology. Put that in your crust and stuff it! Chaac Pizza Northeast, a franchisee with around 111 Pizza Hut locations in New …

[Winkypop]

The food was cold?

I thought that was the whole point of these home delivery services.

[Homo.Sapien.Floridanus]

Re: The food was cold?

There’s mushroom for improvement

[ecofeco]

Re: The food was cold?

There's no topping that pun.

[Korev]

Re: The food was cold?

It was a bit cheesy though

[Ken Shabby]

Re: The food was cold?

Lost a slice of the business and no longer rolling in dough

[Anonymous Coward]

> Drivers were able to see whether additional orders would be up soon, meaning many of them would grab one order and simply wait 15 minutes for another, meaning the first order was invariably late and cold by the time it got to a customer. DoorDash drivers were also able to see any pre-paid tips on the order and whether an order was paid in cash. In many cases, drivers would decline tipless and cash orders.

I cannot stop laughing at this. Why would you give that much information to a contract delivery driver? It reminds me of the horror stories of firefighters who would just stand there and watch a building burn if the owner didn't donate. Like, that information is in no way required or necessary for them to do their jobs. Especially competitive contractor work!

[T. F. M. Reader]

Works as designed. The design sucks.

Why would you give that much information to a contract delivery driver?

The root cause, IMHO, lies not so much with the AI itself, but with people who develop and deploy AI solutions. It is a problem so generic that I think I see it in (just about - this is me being very cautious) every "successful" AI deployment case that crosses my radar screens: people are absolutely lousy at specifying requirements. While in pre-LLM days product managers' bacon was oftentimes saved by architects and engineers, AI is just a program that will do whatever you tell it to do. If your prompt is wrong the result will likely be wrong. If you omit something from the prompt more likely than not it will not be done. Most curiously, albeit not surprisingly, if you do not specifically forbid something to happen there is a chance that it will.

I am guessing that in this case the "prompt" (I am using the word in a generalized sense) did not include "create a 'delivery driver' role with limited read permissions, specifically, do not allow delivery drivers to see anything but the accepted order ID, the time it will be ready for pick-up, and destination address; also, devise and implement an algorithm that will not allow delivery drivers to accept more than 1 order for delivery unless the pick-up times are closer than X minutes to each other and the destination addresses are closer than Y yards to each other." Or something. A decent software architect/engineer (possibly the AC to whose post I am replying) would probably just implement something like this, with or without telling the product manager (probably with, to ascertain good defaults for the time and distance limits, add them to configuration, provide a GUI screen to change, make sure QA test it, etc.). I suspect in this case neither a software architect nor a product manager was involved - both had been made redundant "because AI".

[Pascal Monett]

Re: people are absolutely lousy at specifying requirements

Right you are.

Having spent the vast majority of my professional career as an IT consultant, I must agree.

On top of that, I want to point out that, most of the time, the specifications are drawn up by people who will not actually be working with the end product.

That should be a criminal offense.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: people are absolutely lousy at specifying requirements

My own employer has simply stopped asking for specifications for internal tools and now lets the internal dev team (who are the guys stuck on the bench that we can't let loose on customer systems) guess what the specification and business workflows are.

We ensure release deadlines are met and the software has no identifiable major bugs by not doing any testing.

We ensure client satisfaction through a combination of not asking for feedback or excluding anyone who is likely to give negative feedback.

Thus we ensure that success is guaranteed

[Acrimonius]

Re: people are absolutely lousy at specifying requirements

I have asked countless of times for a spec and even planned in time for a small study to be carried out, information to be gathered and a spec (at least architectural and functional) to be written but response from dev team has been sorry not done before so we can't do a spec. We will tell you as we go along. So the spec grudgedly arrives at the end (much delayed due to the many headless chickens now) and thus it complies with the design but not with what is required.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: if you do not specifically forbid something to happen there is a chance that it will

Indications are that even when you do go to great lengths to explicitly and specifically block off some undesirable bit of result, there's a significant non-zero chance it'll show up anyway.

[JLV]

Re: Works as designed. The design sucks.

OK but if AI made things ever so more productive, then even that risk could be mitigated.

Run it as a cheap experiment, with limited investment and limited commitment. Turn it loose on a few restaurants and see how it works. Improve iteratively, pull the plug if necessary, compensate the franchisee for their role and exposure. After all, vibe coding and all that, no need for a lot of IT gurus, right?

But maybe that's just not possible if you bring in an external actor - Doordouche - whose goals may not align with yours. An actor who actually themselves wears two divergent hats: the company and their, often unsatisfied, freelance contractors, whose goals don't necessarily align either.

If only pizzerias had a tradition of running their own deliveries... :-(

[simonlb]

So, in an industry where everything is controlled by processes refined over decides to be as efficient as possible, the shiny new AI allows the third party, contracted delivery drivers to cherry pick their workload and break the entire workflow. Great job. This makes me so happy when I think of all those GPU's and storage devices I can no longer afford because of AI.

[werdsmith]

It’s not a problem caused by the AI, the fact that the system presents the information to the delivery drivers is an error in the implementation and that the drivers are allowed to accept or decline orders or hang around waiting for more deliveries is a management problem. Could be any system AI or not. Register has again shoehorned AI into this to give the whiners another reason to shit in their Tenas.

[simonlb]

No, I'm pretty sure the article states this is an in-house AI system that the management have mandated every outlet to use, so it is most definitely the AI. Now, if proper testing had been done for all use cases then this issue may well have been caught and avoided, but that hasn't happened. The more pertinent question here is, "Was an AI agent or system even needed?" Which in this instance looks to be a big, fat, "No."

This really does look like someone in the C-Suite decided that there must be some AI somewhere because it is the emperors new rags clothes, and they can't be left behind, even though it obviously has caused more problems than existed before.

[I could be a dog really]

Not only that, but they are mandating use of a tool that they bought. Seems to be an element of "we've paid for this, so it's darn well going to get used regardless"

[MrBanana]

Yup, definitely a case of not drinking your own champagne, but eating your own dog food.

[werdsmith]

Bollocks. Confirmation bias.

Show me how a system cannot be implemented without allowing people to select the best tasks and where it cannot be managed so that people do their jobs properly?

Of course the article implies its an AI cause, because Register loves to make all you pearl clutching hand wringers whine about AI. They are playing to the sad little crowd.

[simonlb]

Confirmation bias?

Ok, I'll bite. Here's a scenario for you:

You are unfortunate enough to be in a car/automobile accident. You have had a limb ripped off. The paramedics are there and have managed to stabilise you. An ambulance takes to you the nearest hospital that is capable of treating you. You get there and are told, "Sorry, the doctors are only treating people with stab wounds today because it's easier and they will get paid more."

The principle is exactly the same, so is that really what you want? Or would you prefer the doctors to actually treat you?

[werdsmith]

Re: Confirmation bias?

You aren’t even on the same planet.

I’m going to buy stock in the company that makes Tenas at this rates. So many wetters.

[elaar]

If it had any Artificial Intelligence, wouldn't it realise that presenting that sort of information to the delivery drivers might not be an intelligent thing to do?

Or is this another case where a system uses external sensors and APIs and so it's automatically (wrongly) classed as AI?

[werdsmith]

The people implementing it can choose what information it presents. Of course they can.

It’s Register readers and their motivated reasoning that believe otherwise.

[JoeCool]

it's a good news story for the drivers

They get to maximize their profits, like God and the constitution intended.

[Filippo]

Re: it's a good news story for the drivers

What? No! The point is for shareholders and the C-suite to game the system and be lauded for it. If an employee or - God forbid - a gig worker attempts to do the exact same thing, they are to be accused of being the reason the system fails, publicly shamed, and, if at all possible, prosecuted.

[Anonymous Coward]

Consolidation under Yum Brands, or Darden, or any other, is the beginning of the end for any restaurant franchise.

[doublelayer]

It appears to have happened in 1997, so I'm not sure you can blame management with other restaurants alone for the problems happening now.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hut Hut Hut Hut

On a mission from AI

[ecofeco]

Re: Hut Hut Hut Hut

We're on a mission from Slop.

[My other car WAS an IAV Stryker]

Re: Hut Hut Hut Hut

Sweet Lady of Acceleration Enshittification, don't fail us now!

Icon: ...It's dark, and we're wearing sunglasses...

[Pascal Monett]

New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Washington DC, and Pennsylvania

Why did they file the complaint in Texas ? They have no business in Texas.

Oh, right, they believe that a Texas judge will be more favorable to their business complaint.

Yeah, maybe, but they're filing against a business, so which business will the judge favor ?

[werdsmith]

Re: New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Washington DC, and Pennsylvania

Pizza Hut inc, Plano TX USA. HQ.

[Anonymous Coward]

I was dragged to Pizza Hut by the kids recently.

Bloody awful and cost me nearly £100 for 4 of us.

I could reheat better pizza from the supermarket in my own oven. I can only imagine the horror that one of their pizzas would be after 30min in a bag on the back of an electric scooter.

[I ain't Spartacus]

Cold pizza can be quite nice. I've got it for lunch today - lovely with a bit of coleslaw.

Pizza Hut pizza on the other hand, seems to be entirely made of strangely tasteless bread - with homeopathic amounts of not very nice stuff on top. At least Dominoes have a distinctive, if over-sweet, tomato sauce.

The odd thing is that supermarket pizza has improved out of all recognition in the last ten years. To the point where I wouldn't order a takeaway pizza, unless there's somewhere really nice close by, because the supermarket ones are nicer than all but the good pizza places. And a third the price. Probably a fifth the price in the case of Dominoes or Pizza Hut (although at least Dominoes is actually edible). I don't know how they've managed to achieve this level of crapness on a foodstuff that's so simple.

[James Wilson]

Maybe I'm using the wrong supermarkets. A few years back I experimented with making my own pizza bases from scratch, it's a whole heap of effort but I wouldn't go back as the end result was way better than anything from the supermarket, regardless of brand.

[Anonymous Coward]

I actually like Pizza Hut deep pan pizzas as an occasional guilty pleasure. No, they are nowhere as good as a decent Italian-style pizza, but there is something comfort-food-like about their thick doughy bases and their tomato sauce is also more flavourful than Domino's (who are the blandest of the bland, in my opinion).

But it's a very rare treat: I still find it hard to accept that a medium pizza from your local independent take-away now costs (rather) more than £8 these days (ditto burger, fries and drink over £5 - yeah, I know, the scary inflation of the past few years), and the £15+ that the US chains want (unless you manage to snarf a special offer) is just ridiculous!

[werdsmith]

Yes, a supermarket three cheese and I buy my own toppings. By coincidence I did one this very lunchtime with anchovies. It was a winner and less than a fiver everything.

[elaar]

I've reached the age where Dominos/Pizza Hut/Papa Johns just destroys my insides. Waking up at 3am gasping for water from consuming 20g of salt, grease and fake cheese has put me off for life.

There's so many other decent takeaway places now that produce pizza that at least resembles the real thing.

Why anyone over the age of 25 uses those American places is beyond me.

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me get this straight

Doordash drivers were giving the franchise a bad name, so the franchise blames the AI system that some bigwig decided that the doordash drivers should have visibility of.

Why didn't they say "doordash are screwing us over. Let's replace them"?? Get your own drivers in, then they can deliver on time under your own control. Or contract it to a different firm. Don't outsource it to the lowest bidder and then wonder why they provide a rubbish service - they do that because you pay a pittance per delivery, so obviously they want to group them to actually make it profitable.

[IGotOut]

Re: Let me get this straight

Did you read the article? Thought not.

[I could be a dog really]

Re: Let me get this straight

It was the way the system was implemented that allowed the DoorDash drivers to game the system. "AI" is pretty irrelevant here- it was simply a stupidly designed system that a 5 year old could have seen problems with. It just happened to have been implemented with AI because ... well they'd spent money buying it, so what can we force people to use it for to justify the cost ?

[Bebu sa Ware]

"another nail in Pizza Hut’s coffin"

In AU I thought they had already done a Norwegian Blue impression but I see their claws are still nailed to the perch.

This Chaac business seems to have taken the "Hut" out of the above subject; more a Domino's^† take·away and delivery business but here at least Domino's employs its own drivers so the Chaac model depending as it does on Doordash, is more in the dark kitchen line.

How hard could it be to fuck up a simple (in)comestible like pizza if all you do is take the orders, make the pizzas and hand them to a delivery service—extremely difficult ? No. Apparently a compete doddle if your pizza base is liberally coated in AI sauce.

In this town there are enough stand·alone pizza and Italian restaurants to facilitate avoiding these US chain pizza horrors—I actually prefer pides which are invariably available from our Turkish, Lebanese restaurants and kebab/yiros takeaways.

I am with Elizabeth David—who suffered the misfortune of living to see the first pizza joints in the UK—in believing that proliferation of gratuitous ingredients in this originally very simple dish was an anathema. The Ligurian recipe she collected in 1952, while including tomato, olives and anchovies, didn't use cheese.

_{† Bloody confusing when the nominative is the genitive form. Domino's's pizzas ?}

[Snow Hill Island]

Re: "another nail in Pizza Hut’s coffin"

"The Ligurian recipe she collected in 1952, while including tomato, olives and anchovies, didn't use cheese."

Good grief, pizza is sometimes made without pineapple. Who knew?

:-)

[Fr. Ted Crilly]

Re: "another nail in Pizza Hut’s coffin"

Theses days I'm largely with the Italians about Pizza, however when it comes to a bit of pineapple on a cheese and hammy pizza they are still wrong...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "another nail in Pizza Hut’s coffin"

Pineapple on pizza is a crime against humanity.

And I grew up in the 1960s when pineapple was on everything “fancy”.

[werdsmith]

Re: "another nail in Pizza Hut’s coffin"

A foil covered potato spiked with cocktail sticks with a cube of pineapple and a chunk of cheddar on the end of each one. These survived as a thing into the 80s.

[isdnip]

Re: "another nail in Pizza Hut’s coffin"

Pineapple on pizza is perfectly good. Tomato and pineapple are both fruits, both semi-tart and sweet. Foil-wrapped potatoes, on the other hand, are a crime against nature. I have no idea why anyone would do such a thing, ruining the best and only healthy part of a potato, the skin.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "another nail in Pizza Hut’s coffin"

The “Pineappleists” walk among us!

[AtomicDog]

AI?

This doesn't sound as though AI is the problem, it sounds like shitty design choices combined with corporate policy have changed the behaviour of the delivery drivers.

I know El Reg is an AI sceptic, but blaming everything on AI somewhat undermines the legitimate cases where AI is the cause of the problem.

[Mark #255]

Re: AI?

If you scroll one screen down the Dragontail website you'll find it described as "true AI throughout".

I think it's entirely reasonable for El Reg to call it AI if both the plaintiff and the makers of the software under scrutiny describe it thusly.

[that one in the corner]

Re: AI?

There is a difference between the vendor *calling* it "AI" and it *being * "AI"[1].

Let alone that it is the AI part of the design/implementation that caused it to leak all this data to Doordash.

Unless, of course, you can point to a citation that describes how the software, once installed in-situ, autonomously changed its behaviour and started to hand over the data (perhaps by "hallucinating" that that was a good thing for it to do).

Even TFA doesn't contain any description of how it was AI-ness that caused the problems; it just points out the idiocy of releasing that data and, gosh, is maybe even being sarcastic by repeating the phrase[2].

[1] see also any place Pizza Hut describes its wares, using such words as "delicious" or "food".

[2] and if anyone *needs* El Reg to add a /s every time an article employs sarcasm[3], well...

[3] or dramatic irony, metaphor, bathos, puns, parody, litotes and… satire

[AtomicDog]

Re: AI?

Still doesn't sound like AI is the actual cause of the problem.

The company and it's product have been around for a while, it's probably the same product configured in a way that fundamentally damaged the plaintiff's business model, with an "AI" natural language layer bolted on top so marketing can call it "AI".

"AI" won't have made the decision to share all that data with DoorDash drivers, that was no doubt made by some dipshit product manager that was probably wined and dined by some DoorDash execs...

[Clausewitz4.1]

Re: AI?

It’s just a f#cking delivery system. Stupid marketing are naming everything AI to sell it.

[QET]

Re: AI?

I'll 100% bet the software shitshow is the pinnacle of vibe-coding.

Although obviously not a positive example, but that's redundant regarding anything AI that's propped up with pride like the "we're tired of listening to professionals" anti-intellectuals who are bursting with pride that they're practically drooling knuckledraggers whose outsourced their critical thinking.

[Anonymous Coward]

Pizza Hut, Taco Bell & KFC are all owned by Yum! which was spun off from Pepsico.

Like all mega brands, it's a race to the bottom in terms of value. Kraft and Cadburys were swallowed [see what I did there] by Mondelez.

Cadburys Dairy Milk can no longer legally be described as chocolate as cocoa has been replaced by increased amounts of Palm oil and Shea butter etc.

I used to love Kraft Dairylea when I was a kid. The current concoction is a slimy gooey mess. Needless to say it's been "reformulated" to be "more healthy" for that read CHEAPER to produce.

Pizza Hut used to be a cheap & cheerful place to take the kids or else get a takeaway but prices have spiralled to the point where it's no longer cheap.

Management have lost the plot and the last time I went in I felt sorry for the hard working staff.

[Marty McFly]

Declined orders

"In many cases, drivers would decline tipless and cash orders.

Right symptom, wrong conclusion.

I worked for many years in pizza restaurants, all the way up to the GM level. My lead in to tech, way back in the mid 90's, was doing point-of-sale for pizza restaurants. That tech company exclusively hired burned out pizza restaurant managers for their tech installers because we knew the business.

Delivery drivers are smart, and savvy. They know exactly who their regular customers are, and which ones will tip well.

Drivers have a lot of seat-time to think through strategies. I've seen drivers mysteriously get caught at red lights so that they miss the next delivery in the cycle....because the customer 2-3 down the list is a known good tipper.

"Tipless" pre-paid credit card orders and "cash orders" does NOT mean the driver will not receive a CASH tip!

Delivery drivers absolutely love cash. They will go back to the store and report they did not receive a tip and got stiffed by the customer, but they have got an extra $5 or $10 in their pocket. No tip splitting with in-store staff, no tax reporting on income.

Tip your delivery driver well, in cash. Be nice to them when you are ordering out on a Friday night and they are busting their butt for you. And I guarantee they will prioritize your order every week.

[Boo Radley]

Re: Declined orders

8 years off and on delivering pizzas, including my entire stint at Ohio State University, taught me a lot. Most drivers will do whatever it takes to skip over small and non tipping orders and grab all the good ones that they can. It's pretty much human nature.

From my experience in downtown Columbus Ohio, headquarters of many huge companies, several stand out. Nationwide Insurance would put in an order for lunch every Friday, dozens of pizzas, subs, salads and drinks, such that the driver spent a lot of their time on that one order, only to be stiffed on the tip every time. Twice, the underling sent with the cart to collect the order at the loading dock, slipped me a fiver when his boss wasn't looking.

Borden, the milk etc corporation, had a team of attorneys always working late on mergers and acquisitions, and their dozen plus pizza order always included at a $50 tip. That was the big difference between the day shift customers and night shift customers, that, and many downtown residents were LGBT folks who understood the service business and tipped extremely well. In the mid nineties I worked three nights a week and frequently cleared around $800 per week. That was good money in a mid priced city at that time. And all done while driving a 15 yo beat up Honda Civic.

I actually made more money as a pizza driver than when I was installing MicroVAXes at DEC in the mid eighties.

[Eighth_]

Not really AI?

I'm not sure AI needed to be in the title of this post. I don't think any AI had anything to do with the issue. If I read the article correctly, the issue was that the software's integration with DoorDash and DoorDash's transparency to the delivery drivers that let them game the system at the detriment of the food and the customers.

[werdsmith]

Re: Not really AI?

AI needs to be in the article to get the whiner brigade wetting themselves again.

Register Clickbait with a lot of dumb people taking the bait.

[Dave559]

Dragon tail

Ah, it's yet another one of those tech-jerk companies where the clue is right there in the name as a warning: do none of them know that tickling the dragon's tail is very rarely a wise thing to do…?

(Also: something, something, prompt critical…)

[IGnatius T Foobar !]

Proud Luddite

As a proud Luddite I have NEVER ordered doordash, uber eats, menu yum, or any of the thousand other "facebook, but with food" services.

Drive to the damn restaurant and pick up your food. It's hotter and fresher and you don't need to tip.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Proud Luddite

States resident here, in the suburbs.

The missus and I rarely if ever use delivery of any kind, and even then, it's a direct hire like Domino's.

Tipping on carry-outs / pickups: For pizza, no tip ever, but for many restaurants, we will tip ~10%, especially the places that take actual care to properly verify orders, especially orders with more item customizations, and/or give us extra ranch dressing for free. Or just because we like them more. (Yes, of course we tip more for seated service / dining in.)

Anon because we have both tried delivery as a side gig. She did GrubHub in 2020 for a couple of weeks, then got sick, so I did it for a few months. Most of my orders were going to really crappy neighborhoods, and I had to start being very careful of what I accepted, which killed the profitability. One restaurant yelled at me for being too early when I was just following their process. A customer yelled at me on the phone post-delivery because there was no salad dressing, as if I was allowed to open a sealed (knotted) bag in the middle of a pandemic, plus my copy of the order doesn't specify that level of detail so I couldn't ask the restaurant about it at pickup. After losing our main car in a(n unrelated) crash, I started again a couple months later. Very first order: young lady customer yelled at me because her stupid apartment parking lot gate didn't follow the procedure she wrote and she blamed me for not doing it right. Not long later, I got in a minor crash (bumper damage only) and gave up. The missus later did 3 gigs with DoorDash for much less pay, and it was hard to even claim them. Thus, we stopped doing gig delivery entirely.

(I swear, plasma "donation" pays better, doesn't take as long, and you can watch YouTube and not drive all over like a maniac with all the other commuting or gig delivery maniacs. Plus I can sometimes feel good about helping others.)

[JLV]

Re: Proud Luddite

The economic and environmental efficiency of driving a $15 burrito in its own taxi to your place so you can pay extra for it are baffling. At minimum wage in most places, the driver’s fees plus Doordash are going to bite hard on such a low base, once past the delivery startup’s loss phase.

As you go up the food value, the economics get somewhat better, but the food deserves better and you could have sat down at what’s perhaps a nice place and been out and about.

Even Snowcrash didn’t quite foresee this:

> "When it gets down to it–we're talking trade balances here–once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries... There's only four things we do better than anyone else: music. movies. microcode (software). high-speed pizza delivery."

p.s. not in any way to diss on the real poor, but I wonder how many paycheck-to-paychecks are big on using Doordash and making big payments on the oversized SUV they think is cooler/safer to drive to the mall with. Even when it was new - it’s an ‘09 - my Civic is usually one of the humblest vehicles in any parking lot.

[Anonymous Coward]

Reads like a classic demonstration of what happens when people who have no idea how the real world works write an overly complicated software system to control it.