Pete,
The reality is that some of the most popular threads on this forum are those that are devoted to clones or copycats of the chain pizzas. Most of those pizzas are the American style. To show you how populat those threads are, even with little current activity, take a look at the page view counts for the threads on the American board at
http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/board,36.0.html. I would say that the bulk of those page views are because of recipe seekers who have found this forum through the use of search engines (most notably, Google).
Reverse engineering and cloning the dough recipes and pizzas of small independent pizzerias is extremely difficult because there is usually very little public information available on such doughs and pizzas. And trying to reverse engineer and clone doughs and pizzas from photos alone is a lot harder than people might think. The Mack's exercise was a lot like that but we at least had some information on the flour and tomatoes, and Norma and other members were able to purchase Mack's pizzas for the purposes of inspection and analysis. It is highly unlikely that I will ever go through a Mack's type of cloning exercise again, at least openly on the forum. The ones who most benefit from that type of effort are those who join the forum solely to look for clone recipes and then leave once they have printed them out.
To add to the above, I agree with Norma that clones of the chain pizzas can be made at home that are, in my opinion, better than what the chains make. Most of the chain pizzas can be replicated without using additives and conditioners and, in most cases, using better cheeses than many of the chains use, especially the biggest chains like Papa John's who use cheeses from industry giants like Leprino's. Some of the smaller chains, like Mellow Mushroom and Jet's, use quality Grande cheeses. And many of the chains, both large and small, use fresh-pack tomatoes from sources such as Stanislaus and Escalon. And their flours are quality flours. In many cases, the ingredients used by many of the chains are better than those used by many small independents. To be sure, there are some chain pizzas that are deserving of criticism, such as Domino's (because of extensive use of additives and conditioners) and Pizza Hut (mainly because of the use of frozen doughs with a lot of additives and conditioners), but even their doughs can be replicated without all the chemicals.
Peter
