Consulting · Restaurant · Mumbai
Outlet EBITDA went from 0.4% to 13%.
The short version
Juno’s Pizza had been trading since 2009 on a family recipe and had built a real following in Mumbai. What it did not have was any way of seeing which of its stores made money and which did not. We pulled eighteen months of sales data apart, built a profit and loss statement for every individual store, and gave the business the controls to act on what it showed. Over the following year outlet-level EBITDA moved from0.4%to13%, company EBITDA improved by twenty points, and sales through the company’s own channels rose from40%to55%of the total.
A company P&L cannot show you a cheese problem
A single set of company accounts tells you whether a restaurant group is making money. It will not tell you why not, because everything that matters is averaged away in it.
Three stores performing well and two bleeding look identical to one mediocre group. A store where portioning has quietly drifted looks identical to a store where rent is too high. And the largest food cost line in a pizza business — cheese — can be running several points above where it should be for years without anybody being able to point at it, because at company level it is a number that looks approximately like it always has.
Averages hide the things worth fixing. The reason store-level accounts change a restaurant business is not that the arithmetic is different — it is that problems stop being able to hide inside a total.
Aditya Shah was not asking us to rescue a failing company. The business was established and he wanted efficiency and growth. The work was to make the business legible enough that efficiency became something you could act on rather than aspire to.
Eighteen months of data
We took eighteen months of sales history and went through it looking for the shape of the business rather than its totals: performance store by store, contribution by category, which items carried the business and which quietly did not, and above all the split between sales the company owned and sales that arrived through third-party aggregators.
Everything that came out was sorted into four buckets — process improvements, operational controls, financial controls, and strategic focus. That separation matters, because these need different responses. A portioning drift is an operational control. A channel mix problem is strategic. Treating them as one list of things to fix is how improvement programmes stall.
What we built
| 01 | An annual business plan with targets set store by store and month by month, each with its own profit and loss statement rather than a share of a group one. |
| 02 | Performance management and target setting across the organisation, tied back to that plan — so the numbers people were held to were the numbers the plan depended on. |
| 03 | Dashboards and financial reporting to give the business proper financial control rather than a monthly retrospective. |
| 04 | Store audit formats and checklists covering efficiency, quality consistency, fill rate, customer experience and NPS. |
| 05 | A focused plan for driving sales through the company’s own call centre and website rather than through aggregators. |
| 06 | The supporting people layer — mission and values, policy redesign, an employee handbook, an incentive plan, and daily morning huddles at store level. |
What changed
| Measure | Before | After | Basis |
|---|---|---|---|
| Outlet-level EBITDA | 0.4% | 13% | |
| Company-level EBITDA | −37% | −17% | |
| Sales through own channels | 40% | 55% | |
| Year-on-year growth | — | +38% | |
| Cheese consumption | above norm | within norm | |
| Sides and desserts fill rate | — | improved |
Where the margin actually came from
Twelve and a half points of outlet EBITDA is a large movement and it did not come from one thing. It came from four, and they are worth separating because they are different kinds of work.
| Channel mix | Fifteen points of sales moved off third-party aggregators and onto the company’s own call centre, delivery team and website. Every one of those points arrives without a commission attached. |
| Input control | Cheese back inside its norm. In a pizza business this is the difference between a recipe and a cost. |
| Loss reduction | Wastage and pilferage, both of which only become visible when a store carries its own profit and loss and somebody owns it. |
| Order value | Better fill rates on sides and desserts, which raises the value of an order that was already being made and delivered. |
Three of those four are only findable at store level. That is the argument for the deliverable: not that a store P&L is a better report, but that without one, several points of margin are structurally invisible.
What we can and cannot tell you
What we can and cannot tell you
The company was still losing money when we finished. Company EBITDA improved from −37% to −17%, which is a large move and is not profitability. Outlet economics were fixed; the central cost base against that revenue was not, and closing the remaining gap was a different piece of work than the one we were engaged for.
The figures are the client’s. We built the reporting that produced them and we saw them during the engagement, but we did not audit the accounts and we have no independent verification to offer.
The period extends past the engagement. We worked from March to November 2018. The 38% growth figure is the 2018–19 financial year and the EBITDA movement was realised over a similar span. The systems were ours; the year of running them was the client’s.
Not everything was quantified. Fill rate improvement, wastage and pilferage reduction were all reported as improvements without figures attached. We have left them described rather than counted.
What happened after
Juno’s Pizza was acquired by Curefoods in January 2022, as part of a five-brand acquisition by the Bengaluru cloud-kitchen group, which described it as a legacy pizza brand out of Mumbai.
That was three years after our engagement ended and we make no claim on it. What we would say is narrower: a business is easier to buy when its unit economics are legible, and outlet-level profitability is the first thing any acquirer asks a restaurant group to show.
Constraints that shaped the work
Nine months is short for this kind of change, and we got the sequencing right partly by luck: the data analysis came first because there was no other way to start, and it turned out to be where most of the value was. Had the brief been framed as an operations project rather than a growth one, we might have begun with process and taken considerably longer to find the cheese.
The bigger gap is the one named above. We fixed the stores and did not fix the company. Central overhead against revenue was outside the scope we were given, and with hindsight we should have said clearly at the start that outlet-level profitability alone would not get this business to break even — because it did not, and a reader is entitled to know that we knew.
In their words
“Debox are very focused in their approach and data driven to achieve results. Working with them was a wonderful experience!”
Aditya Shah — Founder, Juno’s Pizza
If you run more than three outlets
Build a profit and loss statement for every store before you do anything else. Not a sales report by store — a full P&L, with its own costs, owned by somebody whose job it is to defend it.
You will find things you have been paying for without knowing. They will be unglamorous: portion drift, wastage, an aggregator taking a commission on customers who would have ordered from you anyway. Individually none of them is dramatic. Together they are usually most of the margin.
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Measurement note. Scope, duration and deliverables are from our own project records. EBITDA figures, channel mix, growth rate and cost movements are figures reported to us by the client during and shortly after the engagement, produced by the reporting systems built during it, and were not independently audited by us. The acquisition by Curefoods is a matter of public record and is included as context, not as an outcome we are claiming.
