By Heidi Macomber · September 26, 2026

Success stories in the food business usually come with a revenue number and no cost number. This is the first article in a series about the opposite kind: operators who went public with the actual math behind what they did. Two businesses open the series. A 100-year-old Philadelphia bakery that lowered four of its most popular prices. And an accountant who bought a pizzeria that, in his words, "was doing great numbers sales-wise, but wasn't making any money," and rebuilt it around two target percentages. Every number below comes from published interviews with the operators themselves.

The bakery that cut prices

In April 2026, Eater published an interview with Joe Termini, who co-owns Termini Bros Bakery in Philadelphia with his brother Vince. The bakery is more than 100 years old. Instead of announcing another round of increases, the brothers had lowered prices on their most popular family items:

Item Old price New price Cut
Birthday cake $40 $30 25%
Coffee cake ring $25 $15 40%
Pound cake $18 $12 33%
Cupcake $5 $3 40%

The cut column is derived, not quoted. For the cupcake: (5.00 - 3.00) / 5.00 = 2.00 / 5.00 = 0.40, or a 40 percent reduction. The same arithmetic fills the rest of the column.

What made the cuts possible was not a cheaper recipe. Joe Termini told Eater the recipes, serving sizes, and portions will never change: "We'll never change our recipes, we'll never change our serving sizes, we'll never change our portions." The savings came from three cost-side moves, all described in the interview:

  1. Renegotiating with suppliers. The brothers asked their flour supplier what would happen if they bought by the pallet instead of by the 50-pound bag, and whether changing delivery days would change the price. Both questions were their examples of how the conversation started.
  2. Pairing production. Cupcakes and birthday cakes started being baked on the same day instead of on separate days, with larger batch counts.
  3. Passing the savings on. In Joe Termini's words, most companies get more efficient "so that they can keep the profits. Where my brother and I differ is that we want to pass it on to our customers."

The trigger, as he told it, was watching a mother tell her son she could only afford the five cupcakes already in the order, not a sixth for him. In his words, that "was really the drop that made our bucket overflow." The bakery gave the boy the cupcake, and the brothers then, in his phrasing, "locked ourselves in a room" with suppliers on the phone until they had regained control of their costs.

One caveat for a small operator reading this. The Terminis say plainly that volume is part of their leverage: they run multiple locations, and Joe Termini noted that with only one location "we would only have so much purchasing power." A single-shop baker will not get pallet pricing on flour. What transfers is not the volume. It is the method: before you assume a price increase is forced, put the specific questions to your suppliers (bulk thresholds, delivery scheduling, competing quotes) and find out what the answers are worth.

The pizzeria that runs on two numbers

The second story is older but more numeric. PMQ, a pizza industry trade magazine, profiled Sean Brauser, an accountant who left Johnson & Johnson, bought into Romeo's Pizza in Medina, Ohio, and turned around a shop whose sales looked healthy while the owner kept none of them.

His framing, verbatim from the profile: "I run my business on numbers. There are some key numbers that you must understand and control in order to make money." He names the list: food costs, labor costs, contribution margin, ideal price analysis, and breakeven analysis. And he states his two standing targets:

  • Food cost target: about 33 percent of sales
  • Labor target: about 25 percent of sales

Contribution margin needs defining if you have not used it before. Brauser defines it as "profit after food costs and labor costs." Put a $20 pizza through his two targets and the arithmetic looks like this:

Sale price                      $20.00
Food cost at 33%:  20.00 x .33 =  6.60
Labor at 25%:      20.00 x .25 =  5.00
Contribution margin:            $8.40

The $8.40 is what remains to pay rent, insurance, marketing, loan payments, and, eventually, the owner. That is why Brauser calls contribution margin "the most important number." A menu item can sell well and still contribute too little to carry its share of the building.

The profile also contains a due diligence lesson. Brauser paid about $90,000 for an existing location with $20,000 down. The seller claimed weekly sales of $5,000 to $6,000. The actual figure was about $4,000 a week. He verified, bought anyway at the right price, and by his account nearly tripled that location's sales in about three months. The number to keep is not his triple. It is the gap between the seller's claim and the real books, and the fact that he found it before signing.

A caveat here too. The PMQ profile dates to the mid-2000s and covers the single-shop era before Romeo's later franchised. The percentages are his stated targets for that shop, not an industry standard. Your kitchen, menu, and rent set your own.

What the two stories share

Both operators found the money in costs, not in the price list. Termini cut prices and funded the cut with supplier and production work. Brauser held prices to a formula and funded the business with cost targets. Neither story involves selling more. Both involve knowing a specific number and acting on it.

There is also a lesson here about public information. Across the twelve operator stories we researched for this series, Brauser's 33 percent food cost target was the only explicit food cost percentage any operator stated publicly. Operators publish revenue constantly and cost percentages almost never. When you do find one, it is usually in trade press interviews like these, which is where this series will keep looking.

Do this in your own shop

Three moves from these two stories you can make this week:

  1. Re-quote your top five ingredients. Ask each supplier two Termini questions: what price changes at a larger quantity, and whether delivery scheduling changes the cost. Write the answers down. You are not obliged to accept any of them.
  2. Write down your two targets. One food cost percentage, one labor percentage. If you have never set them, start from your last month of actual purchases and pay stubs, then decide the targets you want to hold. You can work both calculations in the free demo at percyplate.com/demo.
  3. Compute contribution margin on one item. Your best seller. Sale price minus its food cost minus the labor it carries. If that remaining dollars figure is small, you have found the Termini problem, price pressure you cannot solve with another increase, and the Brauser solution, cost work, is the one that fits.

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