The Pizza Restaurant Chain That McDonald's Owned In The '90s

For most of McDonald's history, it has kept pizza at arm's length. It has dabbled, to be sure, in the dark arts of cheese and tomato sauce on bread, but aside from a brief experiment with the McPizza back in the 1980s it has been content to stay in its own lane laden with burgers and fries. It's certainly worked out well enough for the Golden Arches, but that doesn't mean there haven't been other pizza-related dalliances in McDonald's history. Case in point: Donatos Pizza was once owned by McDonald's back in the late 1990s.

If you've never heard of Donatos your sense of FOMO may be kicking in, but don't worry. As pizza chains go, it's not as big as Domino's or Little Caesar's (both of which were born in Michigan). Donatos was founded in Ohio, Michigan's rival across Lake Erie. In 1963, a man named James Grote acquired a pizza restaurant in Columbus and set to work turning it into a success with the help of his mother, who prepared the dough. Appropriately enough, Donatos specializes in Columbus-style pizza, which is made with toppings that extend all the way out to the crust. (They proudly proclaim that every large pepperoni pizza has 100 pieces of pepperoni on it.) By the 1990s, it was enough of a success that it had 143 locations, at which point McDonald's stepped in.

McDonald's made the move to acquire Donatos in 1999 back when the fast food king was trying to expand its market share, which it did with intermittent success through the '90s — the high-profile failure of the Arch Deluxe was a notable inflection point. Interestingly, McDonald's had already acquired another franchise, a somewhat obscure Denver-based Mexican chain called Chipotle, a year earlier. At the time, Donatos was seen as the real feather in its cap.

Despite this, McDonald's ended up selling Donatos in 2003, just four years after it bought the chain. Donatos and other non-McDonald's chains owned by the Golden Arches were seen as an unnecessary distraction for corporate, especially since they only brought in about 2% of the company's revenue. Donatos is still going strong today. It has about 180 traditional locations and plenty more attached to Red Robins, bringing the total to around 460. As for Chipotle, which McDonald's sold in 2006, it's become a billion-dollar franchise in its own right. McDonald's is hardly hurting for money, but we can only imagine it stings to miss out on all that dough. (Dough in terms of money, that is — although we suppose they did miss out on Donatos pizza dough when it got sold.)