Who provides all 3 services?

[Trey]

To those of you who run a shop that offers eat-in,carry-out and delivery would you please share your percentages of sales for each? I am planning on buying a shop that used to do only eat-in and carry out but I want to consider adding delivery to the mix also.

 

[bodegahwy]

We do not but I wanted to chime in here anyway. You are asking the wrong question. Here are some others to consider:

1. How much extra peak production capacity do you have? Delivery rush happens at the same time as your regular rush. How many additional pies can your kitchen turn out during the peak? In most kitchens, oven capacity is an absolute limitation, how close to your limit are you now?
2. How much are you prepared to invest in this new business? Buying hot bags, perhaps stocking new beverage items? Room to store and stack boxes? Ramping up payroll in the form of drivers? Hired and non-owned insurance coverage? A meaningful marketing budget to tell the world you are doing this?
3. What population do you have within a couple miles of your store? What are the demographics of that population? Home owners? Renters? Students? What is the competition in that area?

Your delivery will depend on the business available, your investment in going after it and your capacity to fulfill the orders… not a formula related to the number of tables you happen to have. Think of it as a separate business.

 

[Thin2win]

Think LONG AND HARD about it!!.. If you are doing well with out delivery, boy-oh-boy WHY WHY take on the headaches of drivers and loss of product control associated with delivery. It will impact your take-out sales and increase your costs, Driver wages/Insurance/ increased coverage of driver mistakes. That being said, you can make money on it, just not worth the added headache IMHO. If I felt I could stop it now I WOULD and MAY some day!

To answer your question
roughly
30% DI 30% CO 30@ TO
before Delivery
DI 45% TO 55%

 

[NicksPizza]

To answer your question first: I ran a 3-way shop that was dine 25%, deliver 40%, and take-out 35% at our peak.

My question goes this way: why are you considering adding delivery? I am assuming to increase revenues. Bodegahwy asks very good questions along those lines. Then Thin2win throws in some additional costs considerations. Delivery can add gross sales to the top line, and even profits through to the bottom line. But, will you sacrifice your current brand identity to do so?

Delivery shops are generally considered lower position businesses than dine-in shops. I say generally,m because I know there are folks here that do a hopping good business with great market reputation, with DELCO shops.

If I could have removed delivery, I would have in heartbeat, because the overall profitability of a delivered pizza is lower when we already had everything set up for dine in. It limited our menu, increased our labor costs, and made staffing a chaotic mess in our small market. Since you are likely looking to increase revenues and profitability, is it possible to generate more dine in traffic? Dine in tables are generally higher ticket averages per 4 people, have upsell opportunities for beer, apps, desserts . . . allows menu variety with weekly specials, fresher food, immediate service dishes are more possible (like decent alfredo), more chances to develop face to face relationship/loyalty with customers. Yeah, it takes more staff training and time management of orders to do well and excel, but it is so worth it.

Just my thoughts.

 

[indie_pizza]

I’ll chime in and go the complete opposite of other posters. We had a small shop with a beautiful dining room that went, basically, unused outside of the noon lunch hour during the week. Slices and buffet were a lot of work and people expected it to be at a value pricing. However, a well trained staff can allow your pizza cook to do deliveries and a cashier to slide back to make pizzas when they’re out of the store.

 

[bodegahwy]

The basic overhead of delivery (insurance, driver wages, extra advertising, hot bags etc etc) add up to enough, that when coupled with delivery costs which run something like $4 per order, that you have to look at doing a couple thousand per week in delivery sales before it makes any kind of sense to do.

The temptation is to look at it and see only the incremental sales… but not the incremental costs. Do not interpret my comments to be negative and a recommendation not to do delivery. My point is that you need to go into it as a new business center and make the investment needed to achieve meaningful success. Otherwise you are adding complexity and risk without reward and you would be far better off to increase your marketing budget supporting your existing model. For example, I would expect delivery sales of less than 50K per year to contribute ZERO dollars to the bottom line in the first year after realistically accounting for all the costs and sales of less than 100K to add so little that consideration of the added risk and complexity would kill the question for me.

So where do you go from there? If you want to get into the delivery business, make it worth doing. Figure you are going to sink some real money into launching it and shoot for adding at least 200K in revenue… IF, repeat IF your kitchen has the capacity to handle the added volume. If you don’t, I think you are whistling in the wind.