The first location works. You know it works because the numbers say so — revenue above expectations, regulars coming back, the team holds together. You start thinking about the second. This is where it gets complicated. Not necessarily because the second location fails, though it often does. It gets complicated because the success of the first was never fully understood to begin with, and nobody was asking the right questions while things were going well. I have been working in Italian foodservice for thirty years. I have seen this sequence enough times to recognise it early. The operator who tells me his first store does very well but cannot explain exactly why — not in operational terms, not in cost terms — is the operator who will struggle with the second opening and be in serious trouble by the third.

Why the First Store Is Not What You Think It Is

When a restaurant location outperforms expectations, several things are usually happening at the same time, and the operator is typically clear about only one of them. There is the operational quality. The owner is present every day. He knows every supplier personally, adjusts on the fly, absorbs problems before they become crises. This is real skill. It is also completely non-transferable. It does not replicate across locations, and it does not survive a franchisee who has never met the founder's vegetable supplier. Then there is what I call local fit, which is not the same as format validation. A new concept in a neighbourhood that was missing exactly that offer, at that price point, in that moment, catches a wave. New office buildings open nearby, traffic patterns shift, a competitor closes six months before you open. The revenue numbers look like proof that the format works. They are proof that the location worked, at that specific time. Open three kilometres away and the experiment often produces a different result. And then there is timing and luck, which Italian operators are particularly reluctant to name. If you opened outdoor seating in 2021 when it was the only viable option and you had a large terrace, your revenue that year tells you almost nothing about chain performance. Naming luck is not about diminishing what someone built. It is about not making expansion decisions based on variables that will not repeat. When all of this converges — competent owner, fortunate location, good timing — the first store can look spectacular. The problem comes when that performance is treated as a blueprint.

The Franchising Rescue Plan Nobody Calls a Rescue Plan

The second location underperforms. The operator adjusts, invests more, tries to understand. The third becomes a cash drain. At some point — usually around this time — someone suggests franchising. The logic sounds reasonable on the surface: use the first store as proof of concept, find franchisees who bring their own capital, grow without bleeding the company's reserves further. The operator agrees, often quickly, because franchising at this stage is not a growth strategy. It is a way to find other people's money to stay afloat. What follows is usually painful. The franchisee who signs discovers within eighteen months that the model does not work without the founder standing behind the counter six days a week. He stops paying royalties, asks for his money back, or both. The brand that appeared to be scaling contracts faster than it grew. I am not describing edge cases. I am describing a pattern I have seen repeated across a significant share of the Italian franchise market in the past decade. The operators involved are not incompetent — many are genuinely talented restaurateurs. They simply confused a successful restaurant with a scalable business model, and nobody around them pushed back hard enough before the franchising contracts were signed.

PlantBun: What the Work Actually Looks Like

In 2025 I entered PlantBun on a work-for-equity basis. Stefano De Bortoli and Luigi Briga — both former Grom, which is relevant because they understand quality and they understand brand, even if Grom's own scaling story has its complications — had built something real: a plant-based QSR concept with a chiosco in the university district in Turin and a small store in Alba. Genuine product, genuine identity, genuine belief in what they were doing. Also, food cost that was making the P&L very difficult to read. Before any conversation about new locations or franchising, I spent the first period looking at the cost structure and the supply chain. The plant-based semi-finished ingredient market in Italy is more developed than most people assume, but you cannot approach it the way a single-location restaurateur approaches his relationships with local producers. The purchasing was being managed on personal contacts, spot prices, informal arrangements. Every week was a different conversation with a different supplier about a different price. That is fine when you have one location and the owner is making every call himself. It becomes a structural problem the moment you need consistency across multiple units. The first intervention was supply agreements — fixed prices, volume commitments, defined terms. The food cost dropped to a level where the numbers started making sense. The second was delivery positioning. Not primarily to reduce commissions, though that matters too, but because PlantBun was either invisible or poorly positioned on the platforms where its target customer actually made decisions. Delivery is not just a revenue channel in the current market. For a brand that starts with a real prejudice from traditional investors — plant-based food is still treated as a trend by a large part of the Italian franchisee investor base, not as a consolidating segment — visibility on the right platforms with the right positioning was part of how the brand built credibility beyond Turin. The third was content and positioning work, primarily on LinkedIn, to place PlantBun in a broader conversation about the future of Italian foodservice rather than in a plant-based niche that many investors have already decided they are not interested in. A new investor entered and acquired a majority stake. PlantBun subsequently opened in a shopping centre in Turin and began structured development planning. I am not involved in the new phase — that is how these things often work, and it is fine — but the foundation that made that investment possible was built in those first months of operational work, not in the pitch deck.

The Ceiling That Nobody Wants to Discuss

Here is something I have come to believe after thirty years, and I say it knowing it is not what most operators want to hear: traditional Italian cuisine, prepared with real technique and real ingredients, does not scale comfortably beyond eight to ten locations. This is not a management failure or a lack of ambition. It is a characteristic of the product. The margin for process error in Italian cooking is structurally low. If a hamburger is cooked thirty seconds longer than intended, it comes out crunchier. You sell it. Some customers prefer it that way. If pasta is cooked thirty seconds too long, you throw it away — there is no recovery, no reframing, the product is gone. This asymmetry is not something you solve with better training or better technology. It is built into what Italian food is. The benchmarks that circulate in our industry — food cost below a certain percentage, labour cost targets, break-even timelines — were largely developed for American format logic. They were designed for concepts where the kitchen is essentially an assembly operation, where semi-finished ingredients arrive pre-standardised, where a new employee can produce a consistent result after two weeks of training. The operational tolerance is high by design, because the system was engineered to absorb human error at scale. Italian cooking was not engineered. It evolved in contexts where the cook had decades of experience and adjusted everything by feel, where the ingredient quality varied seasonally and the recipe adapted accordingly. Translating that into a chain format requires either simplifying the product to the point where it is no longer what made it good, or accepting a ceiling on how far you can grow before quality becomes the constraint that limits you. The Italian formats that have genuinely scaled to fifty, one hundred, two hundred locations are almost without exception formats with very little operational complexity: burger chains, piadina chains — which are essentially a single product with a short preparation window — pizza chains built on standardised dough and a contained topping selection. These succeed for the same reason American fast food succeeds: the product tolerates industrial process without significant quality loss.

The International Development Question

The piadina is worth a separate paragraph because it illustrates something that goes beyond operations. As a format it works in Italy. Single product, fast preparation, strong regional identity. When operators try to export it, they encounter a resistance that has nothing to do with cost structure or supply chain. For an Italian consumer, a piadina is not just food. It is a specific memory — a summer in Romagna, a stop on the motorway, a sensory experience tied to a place and a time. That memory is part of what justifies the purchase, the loyalty, the willingness to pay. A British or German consumer eating a piadina in their own city is eating a flatbread sandwich. The emotional context that gives the product its meaning is absent, and you cannot create it through marketing. You cannot communicate your way to a cultural memory that the consumer does not have. The Italian formats that export successfully — pizza, gelato, espresso — have been present in international markets long enough to have built their own cultural context outside Italy. They no longer require the Italian memory to function. Everything else, including the piadina, faces a version of this wall.

What to Do With All of This

If you have one location that works and you are thinking about the second, the first question is not where to open. It is why the first one works — specifically, in terms that separate what you did from what the location did for you, and what that particular moment in time did for both of you. If you cannot answer that with some precision, the second opening is a bet, not a plan. If you have two or three locations and the numbers are not working, franchising will not fix the underlying problem. It will distribute it across more people, some of whom paid an entry fee to be part of it. And if you are building something in Italian food and you are honest with yourself about the product's complexity, eight well-run locations with real margins and a brand that means something locally is a genuinely good outcome. It is not the story that gets told at industry conferences. But it is sustainable, and in Italian foodservice, sustainable is rarer than it should be.