The rise and fall of Dial-a-Dino’s home-delivered pizza ... a supreme story with the lot
Years before Uber Eats, Dial-a-Dino’s brought home-delivered pizza to the masses in tiny cars with a giant phone on the roof. It was franchised around Australia – then vanished overnight. This is what happened.
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Long before Uber Eats, Deliveroo and Menulog, local entrepreneur Richard Wescombe pioneered fast-food delivery around the suburbs of Adelaide with his Dial-a-Dino’s.
Every night, the little yellow Daihatsus, with big red, illuminated phone handsets on the roofs, could be seen racing around city streets, delivering piping-hot pizza in what was the forerunner of today’s massive fast-food delivery industry.
“The idea originally came from an episode of the TV show Leave it to Beaver,” Wescombe says. “Watching an episode of the show one night I saw that they ordered pizza in.
“I don’t know if it was a particular vehicle that brought it but it just tripped something in my mind. And that’s how it all started.
“I was already involved in Bertie’s Pancake Kitchen at the time and went off to Queensland to look at a company called Sylvio’s Dial a Pizza.
“They had a unique idea where they were delivering pizzas and they had these funny-looking things on the roof of their cars, like a phone with spotlights on them. So it was not so much a new idea; it was more just an improvement on an old idea.
“I came back to Adelaide and I started doing a fair bit of work. I designed the phone that was internally lit and that was a big part of the success of Dial-a-Dino’s, the recognition of those cars really drove the business in the early days.
“Whatever new market we went into, those little phones on top of the cars were pure gold in getting attention.”
I reminded Wescombe of the story I’d once heard of him being locked away in a hotel room for a week, writing the business plan for his new company.
He had been dealing with some people who were advising him on franchising and they told him he needed to commit to writing a business plan and a procedures manual.
“So I spent a week in a Sydney hotel locked away, just writing non-stop,” Wescombe says.
“And that was before the days of word processors and computers. I wrote it all by hand, came back home and had someone type it all up.”
The first Dino’s Dial-a-Pizza opened in November 1984, at St Peters (it soon changed its name to Dial-a-Dino’s to avoid a clash with a Victorian pizza business).
The launch was a major media event compered by well-known Adelaide radio personality (the late) Big Bob Francis, with live music and, of course, lots of free pizza.
Dick Frankel’s Jazz Disciples played and the shiny new delivery vehicles were parked out front for everyone to see.
The new venture was an immediate success and rapidly expanded, opening branches in other suburbs.
“There was a great spirit within the company,” Wescombe recalls. “I think it was because we were new and it had a nice feel about the imagery.
“We drove family values and the staff liked that. A lot of the team were kids studying at university and this was a bit of social activity for them as well. A lot went on to be successful in their chosen field but worked for Dino’s for a few years.”
Based on the runaway success of the Adelaide venture, over the next five years Wescombe embarked on an aggressive expansion program.
He travelled around the nation, establishing franchises in all states as well as overseas, and in 1988, the SA Great committee named him one of that year’s six Great South Australians. By 1989, there were 120 stores in Australia, 16 in New Zealand, eight in Japan and six in the UK.
“It was an enormously exciting time but a bit like holding a tiger by the tail; we just had to keep going,” Wescombe says.
“I actually won an award from Ansett Airlines because I flew more than anybody else in Australia in 1988. I was just trying to keep up with it all.”
By the mid-1980s, Pizza Hut, the American restaurant chain and international franchise, was beginning to expand, especially in the bigger markets of Sydney and Melbourne.
“We were already quite big in both cities and they thought they could grow that part of their business a lot quicker if they acquired us and that’s when they knocked on our door,” Wescombe says.
“It took about 12 months of negotiations to get it across the line. We had a lot of franchisees in the business who were really just like individual store owners, and we had state sub-franchisors looking after the franchisees.
“We had to get them all to agree to the deal with PepsiCo, the owners of Pizza Hut.
“But eventually it was done (in 1989) and they changed the name to Pizza Hut and Dial-a-Dino’s was gone; it just suddenly didn’t exist any more.”
“Looking back on those years now, it was just lots of fun. I remember in the early days at St Peters, we’d close at 2 o’clock on a Saturday morning after working flat out from early on a Friday evening,” Wescombe adds.
“At the end of the shift we were still pumped up and everyone from all the other stores would meet in a place called Jules nightclub in the city (now the The Woolshed on Hindley Street). Often we’d be there until 4am in the morning just laughing and talking.
“We’d keep coming up with new ideas all the time on how to promote the business, and then change them for the next new ideas a month or two later. People wanted to see change. It was all so exciting at the time, being in a company like that.”
Wescombe moved on and, after Dial-a-Dino’s, purchased Stanford Mowers, which he owned and operated for a short time before venturing out into his new enterprise, Snowys Outdoors, in which he is still involved.
Bob Byrne is the author of Adelaide Remember When and posts memories every day on facebook.com/adelaiderememberwhen