It’s IBS awareness month and so I’ve decided to talk about things that I find really infuriating about having IBS and food intolerances!
We all love takeaways and gradually there seems to be progress in this department! Allergen information is creeping onto take out menus and chains are slowly bringing out gluten and dairy free options.
However, there’s still a long way to go as I figured out on Saturday when I tried to order a gluten free pizza without the cheese. Now some of you clever clogs will know that Pizza Hut can easily make this happen with a few clicks of a button online. But unfortunately they don’t deliver to me which is a pain when you want something convenient.
So who else to turn too, Dominoes… Obviously. They deliver to me ✅ they do gluten free pizza ✅ what could possibly go wrong.
A lot. A lot can go wrong.
So because I wanted to order no cheese on my pizza I couldn’t order online, very annoying that they don’t have that option like Pizza Hut do. So I phone up my local store and after about ten minutes of the lady trying and failing to find my address, we got to the important bit.
“Can I have a gluten free pizza please” I asked. Fair enough you’d have thought? However I got a simple reply of “we don’t do gluten free orders on the phone, you have to order online” she said. Leaving me slightly confused. Why did I have to order online for gluten free but not for any other pizzas. Second dilemma, I can’t order online because there’s no option for no cheese! So I explained this to the lady and she simply replied “we can’t do that, we don’t do no cheese options” she explained. Now obviously I knew this isn’t the case. Dominoes make their pizzas to order and so they would very easily be able to skip putting the cheese on! So I asked her why she couldn’t do no cheese, and she simply told me I couldn’t order gluten free on the phone and so if I wanted a gluten free pizza I had to order online. Or if I wanted no cheese I could just order on the phone but the pizza wouldn’t be gluten free! How helpful…they’re willing to cater to one of my intolerances but not both.
Slightly outraged I called up another dominoes in the area who told me, that they would happily take my order over the phone because of my added dairy intolerance! However they couldn’t deliver to me, so they advised me to call the other store back.
So I did exactly that, now even more infuriated that one dominoes would sell me a gluten and dairy free pizza and another told me I could have one or the other. So once we got past the address and my details we arrive at what I want to order. I ask for a gluten free pizza and once again I’m told I can’t order it on the phone. So I do what I probably should’ve done initially and asked to speak to the manager.
He was quick to listen to the dilemma and simply told me that dominoes had been sued so frequently by gluten free customers that they had to change how the pizzas were ordered. Which I can understand, as no one wants to be sued. But equally, I don’t think anyone who already has the hassle of having intolerances should have to order any differently to other people. Now the lovely manager was quick to add that if I ordered the gluten free pizza online then I could just call up after and he would edit the order so that I got no cheese. Now wasn’t that problem overcome quickly. If the woman had told me this in the first place I wouldn’t have wasted 40 minutes trying to order a god damn pizza.
Now let’s discuss the inconvenience of ordering a pizza that’s gluten and dairy free. You have to order the gluten free online and the dairy free by phone. Come on dominoes, sort it out! All of this could very easily be overcome by a simple ‘no cheese’ option when you modify your pizza!
Now after the disastrous ordering process I wasn’t expecting much. Part of me thought they’d spit in my pizza for being so fussy but when it arrived I was practically gobsmacked. The pizza was amazing, I had plenty of toppings and lashings of sauce! It was super yummy and it certainly filled a hole. Was it worth the aggro? Absolutely not. Would I order again? Probably…but only because I really like pizza.
Has anyone else had a similar experiance? Let me know!
MyIbsandMe x
My IBS and Me... 