--- title: "Know Your Numbers. Run a Better Shop." description: "The five metrics every pizzeria owner should track weekly — and how to use them to drive profit, not just sales." canonical_url: https://ovenscars.com/articles/know-your-numbers-run-a-better-shop/ author: "Oven Scars Editorial" publisher: "Oven Scars" section: "Operations" date_published: 2026-08-01T00:00:00.000Z tags: ["metrics", "prime cost", "labor", "systems"] word_count: 475 reading_time_minutes: 6 license: "CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 — cite as \"Oven Scars\" and link the canonical URL" --- # Know Your Numbers. Run a Better Shop. *The five metrics every pizzeria owner should track weekly — and how to use them to drive profit, not just sales.* **Operator takeaway:** Five numbers, once a week, same day every week: prime cost, food cost variance, labor % by daypart, online share of sales, and beverage attach. Twenty minutes that outperform any dashboard you're not reading. The industry drowns operators in reports and starves them of decisions. A number only matters if it changes what you do on Monday. Here are the five that do — with the benchmark for each, sourced, so you know what good looks like. ## 1. Prime cost — the health check Food plus labor as a share of sales. Quick-service benchmark: [55–60%](https://www.restaurant365.com/blog/how-to-calculate-prime-cost-in-a-restaurant/); Baker Tilly's QSR dataset says [57.4% (30.5% food, 26.9% labor)](https://info.bloomintelligence.com/hubfs/Miscellaneous%20Downloads/Restaurant%20Benchmarks.pdf). Weekly, not monthly — a bad month is four bad weeks you didn't catch. ## 2. Food cost variance — the leak detector The gap between what your menu math says food should cost and what it actually cost. Best-in-class operators hold it to [about one percentage point](https://www.restaurant365.com/blog/closing-the-gap-between-actual-and-theoretical-food-costs/); a 2.5-point gap is real money walking out the back door as over-portioning, waste, and shrink. For scale: Restaurant365 customers eliminated an estimated [$318 million in food waste in one year — about 1.2% of food sales](https://www.restaurant365.com/blog/5-restaurant-kpis-to-track-weekly/). ## 3. Labor % by daypart — the schedule test Pizza Today's 2026 survey puts pizzeria labor at [23–28% of sales](https://pizzatoday.com/news/2026-pizza-industry-trends-report/615558/). The blended weekly number hides the story: a shop can run 24% overall while burning 40% on dead Tuesday afternoons and understaffing Friday rush. Break it out by daypart and staff to the curve, not to habit. Set a sales-per-labor-hour target per daypart, as [Restaurant365 recommends](https://www.restaurant365.com/blog/5-restaurant-kpis-to-track-weekly/) — there's no universal magic number, but your own trend line is the tell. ## 4. Online share of sales — the channel mix Across the industry, [~84% of pizzerias take online orders, averaging 26.9% of sales — and for more than 18% of shops it's over 45% of revenue](https://pizzatoday.com/news/2026-pizza-industry-trends-report/615558/). Know your split between first-party (your site, your data, your margin) and third-party (their commission, their customer). The [46% of operators using third-party services](https://pizzatoday.com/news/2026-pizza-industry-trends-report/615558/) average 12.4% of sales there — fine, as long as you've priced the channel honestly. ## 5. Beverage attach — the free margin Drinks carry [300–500% markups](https://www.pmq.com/managing-food-costs-in-2026/), the best margin in the building. Attach rate — drinks per order — is the cheapest profit lever you have. Veteran operator Joe Farruggio, who targets 3–4% net, [reviews profit percentages monthly and adjusts](https://www.pmq.com/managing-food-costs-in-2026/); the discipline matters more than the dashboard. Top-quartile independent shops on Slice's network averaged [$658,548 in annual sales](https://www.pmq.com/pizza-power-report-2026-pizzeria-failure-rate-is-not-what-you-think/) in 2025 — and PMQ still found plenty of high-revenue shops earning 2–3% net. Revenue is vanity, prime cost is sanity. Pick a day. Same day, every week, twenty minutes: prime cost, food variance, labor by daypart, online mix, beverage attach. Write the five numbers on the office wall next to last week's. The trend line — not the number — tells you what to fix. What this doesn't cover: speed of service. There's no honest published benchmark for pies-per-oven-hour or delivery times — the chains stopped publishing theirs. Track your own, week over week. Your baseline is the only one that matters. ## Sources cited - https://www.restaurant365.com/blog/how-to-calculate-prime-cost-in-a-restaurant/ - https://info.bloomintelligence.com/hubfs/Miscellaneous%20Downloads/Restaurant%20Benchmarks.pdf - https://www.restaurant365.com/blog/closing-the-gap-between-actual-and-theoretical-food-costs/ - https://www.restaurant365.com/blog/5-restaurant-kpis-to-track-weekly/ - https://pizzatoday.com/news/2026-pizza-industry-trends-report/615558/ - https://www.pmq.com/managing-food-costs-in-2026/ - https://www.pmq.com/pizza-power-report-2026-pizzeria-failure-rate-is-not-what-you-think/ --- Published by [Oven Scars](https://ovenscars.com/) — Industry · Culture · Craft. Editorial standards: https://ovenscars.com/editorial-standards/.