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Russia’s Pizza King Wants to Use the Cloud to Take Over the World

The founder of Dodo Pizza says it’s “half food and half tech”—and he wants to open another 1,000 restaurants in five years.

Fyodor Ovchinnikov at his Dodo Pizza restaurant in Moscow.

Fyodor Ovchinnikov at his Dodo Pizza restaurant in Moscow.

Photographer: Elena Chernyshova/Bloomberg
Corrected

Once you crack the profit code for delivering hot pizzas in the Arctic, where blocks of cheese arrive on nuclear icebreakers, expanding into more hospitable climes like Britain and Nigeria is as easy as pie.

Or so says Fyodor Ovchinnikov, the freshly crowned franchise czar of Russia and soon, he’s betting, beyond. From a single basement oven in his native Syktyvkar in the Far North, the failed bookseller and serial blogger has turned Dodo Pizza into one of Europe’s fastest-growing restaurant chains, leapfrogging Papa John’s, Domino’s and Pizza Hut in his home market in just eight years.