If he had stayed there he would have ended up as one of the top executives and raked in the bucks as it went nationwide.

They hadn't expanded much yet, and he left to work on offshore rigs so he could rake in the bucks right then.

When he came back he started his own pizza company in Houston not much different than Domino's, delivery and pickup only, no dining.

I actually did some lab analysis on his ingredients back then even though I didn't have anything like a full nutritional lab, I could still test things like the salt content, water content, smoke point of oils, etc just fine with my industrial instruments.

His company didn't grow to that many locations before his 51% investor decided to cash out and sell the company, so he got an OK payout but never reached a fraction of the growth that was within reach from the established foundation, after all the work building it.

After it was sold, they never grew any more, it was typical founder-dependent growth, built upon a foundation that nobody else could recognize the value in, nor do anything about it.

Now he's a retired restaurant executive from major chains.

In later years the Papa John guy was one of the top people in Domino's, who decided to leave and start his own company one day.

He had large enough backing that he was never going to absolutely fail, and he was able to do it a little bit differently to start out.

With lower-salt lower-fat pizza and see if it flies off the shelf.

You just can't say that out loud or all kinds of people will run the other way.

So that was translated to "Better ingredients make better pizza."

Which it pretty much did, with less of the most habit-forming ingredients that had been gradually boosted everywhere else over the years.

Plus to really satisfy the customers who are trying to keep their weight up as much as possible, and keep them from thinking anything is missing at all, there's all the fat & salt that would otherwise be baked in, right there in the little cup of garlic sauce. And you can have more just for asking :)