Behind the Numbers

True Food Kitchen runs 2,200 active recipes to power a menu of fewer than 100 items. Stephan Manning, Director of Restaurant Systems and Optimization, joins Behind the Numbers to explain how a 46-location scratch kitchen keeps 1,200 purchase items, 16,000 vendor items, and close to 2,000 invoices a week clean and moving through Restaurant365. Stephan covers the yield-on-yield recipe structure a scratch concept demands, the 7,000 mistakes he carried out of a failed lighthouse implementation and

Munsok So's 612North event space did $220,000 in sales across two days, including more than $160,000 in a single four-to-five-hour event. On this episode of Behind the Numbers, the president and CEO of So Hospitality Group, who signed on with Restaurant365 when the company had 11 employees, walks through how he built eight restaurants across four concepts in the St. Louis area: Drunken Fish, Kimchi Guys, Stein Haus, and 612North. So explains the labor budget every store receives with the rule o

Six months after their first farm stand order, Julie Mountain and Dana Noorily were selling granola in 52 Whole Foods stores and making almost nothing on it. On this episode of Behind the Numbers, the co-founders and co-CEOs of The Granola Bar explain why they abandoned CPG, how a cold call to a Dannon-owned yogurt shop led to a 1,200 square foot kitchen with an 800 square foot dining room attached, and how that store became a ten-location group. The numbers run through the whole conversation:

GPS Hospitality sells somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 million Whoppers a year, and VP of Operations Support Gary Thomas can walk you through the math: 400 guests a day per store, almost 60 million guests a year, a third of them ordering a Whopper. On this episode of Behind the Numbers, Thomas explains how one of the nation's largest Burger King franchisees grew from 42 restaurants in 2012 to just under 400 Burger Kings and 16 Popeyes with about 10,000 employees. Thomas gets into the philoso

Smokey Mo's BBQ sells over 1 million pounds of brisket a year, and President Craig Haley can walk you through exactly where every ounce goes. Recorded live at the NRA Show 2026, this episode of Behind the Numbers digs into the unforgiving math of Texas barbecue: a pound purchased becomes half a pound sold, briskets cook 10 to 13 hours and get fork-tested in 5 or 6 spots, and actual versus theoretical gets tracked meat by meat with weekly inventories. Craig explains how tighter product managemen

The Big Biscuit sold 1,388,759 biscuits last year, and VP of Finance Alex Clark can tell you the exact figure. Recorded live at the NRA Show 2026, this episode of Behind the Numbers gets into how The Big Biscuit runs finance on real data: capturing every sales channel, cutting manual accounts payable work, scaling from a handful of locations to two dozen, and pricing a premium menu item without pricing out the guest. Alex explains why "good enough" data compounds into bad decisions, how her tea