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%; Baker Tilly’s QSR dataset says 57.4% (30.5% food, 26.9% labor). 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; 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.
3. Labor % by daypart — the schedule test
Pizza Today’s 2026 survey puts pizzeria labor at 23–28% of sales. 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 — 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. 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 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, 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; the discipline matters more than the dashboard.
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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.
