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Independent restaurants often run on instinct. Wholly Stromboli runs on instinct and instrumentation. In this conversation, co-owner and World Pizza Champion Melissa Rickman shows exactly how a small, single-unit shop can operate like a polished multi-unit brand by letting the numbers call the plays and then building culture and systems that make those plays repeatable.
Melissa lays down the thesis every operator needs taped to the expo window: “Use your menu as your roadmap—and your numbers as the guide. If it’s not making you money, why sell it?” It sounds simple, but it’s the backbone of Wholly Stromboli’s discipline. Menu items that can’t carry their weight don’t survive on sentiment; they’re evaluated against contribution dollars, actual food cost, and mix. That posture freed the team to right-size labor, trim waste, and invest where the returns are real.
Wholly Stromboli currently operates one location and is “pregnant with another,” as Melissa jokes – “1.5 units.” Before growth, she and partner/CFO Eric tightened the house. By leveraging sales-per-labor-hour forecasting and clean scheduling data, the team reduced staff from 48 to 38 while maintaining tight service. The smaller, sharper crew isn’t an austerity play; it’s a byproduct of clarity. When you know the demand curve by daypart and station, you schedule to reality, not hope.
That same clarity showed up in cost control. In the most recent period, food costs landed at 18.5%, which is remarkable for a full-service concept. The period prior blipped to 23% after a walk-in failure, but even that spike had a story: “That’s what waste logs are for,” Melissa notes. When the team records loss rigorously and then investigates, anomalies become lessons, not lingering leaks.
Ask Melissa how they keep food costs low and consistency high, and she doesn’t talk theory. She talks tools, habits, and accountability: scaled recipes, engraved scoops, and “scales on” as a non-negotiable. “We engraved every scoop and lay them out nightly so everyone knows what goes where,” she says. Managers perform AM line checks, then ask in the afternoon, “Why isn’t your scale on?” Standards aren’t a binder on a shelf; they’re instrumentation in plain sight.
That instrumentation extends to inventory and ABT (Actual vs. Theoretical) analysis every week. When variances appear, they don’t shrug them off. Instead, they go looking. One memorable chase led through security footage to a pack-size change: a sauté cook grabbed half-gallon containers of cream where the recipe assumed quarts. The fix wasn’t blame; it was updating the recipe to match reality and re-training to the current pack.
With a second concept on the way, Melissa and Eric are documenting systems before opening: recipes built directly into Restaurant365, procedures written as they test, and equipment decisions tied to data. “Even if you’re not going to 20 stores, act like you might,” host Marc underscores. Melissa agrees and adds a practical reason: owners need to be able to step out for a week or two without the wheels coming off. Documentation isn’t just for expansion. It’s for sanity.
That mindset shows up in an extraordinary stat: since opening in 2010, Wholly Stromboli has produced 866,672 dough balls, equaling 336,465 pounds of dough. They know this because they track both sales and waste, and because they asked their in-house AI coach to roll it up when choosing a new dough divider. Numbers answer equipment questions, too.
Melissa is the visionary and Eric is the analytical CFO and together, they deploy tech wherever volatility or volume lives. Beverage menus sit on iPads so pricing and stock changes update instantly. Hiring runs through an ATS, which turned trickles of iffy applicants from Craigslist and Facebook into a flood of qualified candidates. “It felt like putting on the big-league jersey,” Melissa says of their recent GM search with eight truly qualified finalists, multiple interview rounds, and a choice made from strength, not scarcity.
They also use AI to simulate before they spend. Faced with tariff-driven cost increases on pasta sheets and a perceived $19 price ceiling on an appetizer, Melissa fed sales mix, recipes, and local comps to her AI assistant. The model recommended a $1 price increase and projected a near wash over a year, given the item’s mix and the offset from more profitable sellers. “You’re taking dollars to the bank, not percentages,” Melissa reminds herself (and the rest of us).
Sometimes AI even jumps on the line creatively. When Melissa wanted Fior di Latte gelato with ribbons of olive oil, the bot suggested blending the oil with white chocolate to adjust viscosity and hold the ribbon. She handed the idea to Eric to test, offering proof that tech can spark R&D, not just reconcile it.
Underpinning it all is a stance: independent doesn’t mean improvised. “We have to take our businesses serious. If we don’t, nobody else will,” Melissa says.
That means building a restaurant that someone could buy. It means saying no to off-menu requests that erode consistency. It means teaching managers your why, then getting out of their way so they can own outcomes. Above all, it means not apologizing for profit: “This isn’t a hobby.”
Wholly Stromboli’s story is a great lesson for operators: measure what matters, install the guardrails, and let the culture make the math inevitable. Do that, and the next concept isn’t a leap of faith but a step in a path that’s already been worn.
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