Calulating demand for Take and Bake

[Helaman]

I am in the early stages of setting up a Take and bake pizza shop in Sacramento. I am on a large busy main street. Also, surrounded by a few thousand resident homes.

I am trying to guess what my demand may be once opened. I realized within a week or two I will have some idea what I need to be prepared for an evening rush, but would like to be setup right out of the box for potential customers. Naturally, I will be doing a grand opening and that may even complicate things trying to be ready.

But once things settle down, I am wondering what demand may be after the opening honey moon. I am sure someone must be in a similar area and already been “around the block” a few times. Any way to guess / calculate daily demand for take and bake pizzas. I realize certain days will be heavy than others, ie Friday nights, etc. I am just looking for a best guess for my piece of mind.

Thanks

 

[paul7979]

Honestly, there really isn’t a way to answer that. I have seen stores open up with very small marketing budgets and do incredible sales right off the bat and others spend the money on marketing and still struggle to get to their break even point.

That said, I’ll give you my best guess. Papa Murphys(the only take and bake chain that I know) averages about 480K annually per store. I would tend to think that you would be lucky to start off at 70% of their average so I’ll use aprox $6500 per week. Without knowing your price point, I’ll insert my own figures. I average about $12.50 in sales for every pizza I put out the door. If the same is true for your store, you’ll do 520 pizzas in order to do $6500 in sales. At my store the daily sales are distributed about 9% on both Monday and Tuesday, about 11% Wednesday, 14% Thursday, 24% Friday, 20% Saturday and 13% Sunday.

Keep in mind I’m using what I would consider a high estimate of 70% of what the closest chain concept does in sales. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if you opened at half of this estimate, or even 1.5 times higher than it. There’s just too many variables, many of which are not quantifiable and will remain unknown until you open. I don’t think there’s very many people on this board that focus on take and bake.