Restaurant and aggregator profitability

We rebuild restaurant profit channel by channel: dine-in, own app and website, each aggregator, and each aggregator's promotion programme. Food cost, packaging, commission, funded discounts, delivery fees, refunds and waste are assigned to the order that caused them.

The board sees what each brand and each site earns on each route to the customer, and which aggregator terms are worth the volume they bring.

• A channel profit statement per brand and site, from menu price to cash received.
• An aggregator terms review comparing commission tiers, advertising and discount obligations with the volume delivered.
• A menu and price architecture paper recommending prices by channel.
• A migration model showing the cash effect of moving a share of orders to your own channel.
• A brand and site decision paper naming what to expand, hold or close.

• Contribution per order is known by channel and by brand.
• The take rate on each aggregator is stated after commission, advertising and funded discounts.
• Own-channel orders and contribution are reported as a share of the total.
• Menu prices on the platform and on your own channel sit side by side.
• Cash received is set beside the sales each platform reports.

Aggregator reports show gross sales and a payout. They do not show what the payout leaves after food cost, packaging and the discounts the restaurant funded. A brand can lead an aggregator's rankings and still lose money on most of its orders there. Meanwhile the customer relationship, and with it the repeat purchase, belongs to the platform.

• Aggregator orders are growing faster than dine-in and own-channel orders, and group profit is not.
• Commission, advertising and funded discounts are booked in several accounts and never added together.
• Menu prices on aggregators were raised without a view of what customers did next.
• No one can say how much a repeat customer is worth when the order came through a platform.
• A brand is kept open because of sales volume that its contribution does not support.

Owners and chief executives of multi-brand restaurant groups, cloud-kitchen operators and food and beverage businesses in the Gulf that take a large share of orders through third-party platforms.

Qasim Abbas is the author of Moneyball Finance, where who controls the customer is the central argument, and has answered for treasury above USD 50M at group level. We read your platform terms through both: who owns the customer and what each order leaves behind.

We read exports from your point-of-sale system, aggregator dashboards and ledger. The aggregator margin tool follows one aggregator order from menu price to contribution margin. See how fees work.

Should we leave the aggregators?

The analysis shows which orders earn at each platform's terms and the cash cost of moving volume to your own channel.

Does this cover cloud kitchens and dark stores?

Yes. A site that serves only delivery channels is easier to cost, because every order carries a platform or delivery cost.

Forward one brand's last quarter of aggregator payouts. We show what a channel profit statement for that brand looks like and where the largest gap sits.