Written By: Gargi Sarma There’s a particular kind of frustration every retail pricing leader knows. You pull the weekly competitor report on Monday morning, spot a price move that happened six days ago, and spend the next hour working out what it cost you. The data told you everything — just far too late. That experience is becoming rarer. Not because pricing has got simpler — it hasn’t — but because the underlying data infrastructure has fundamentally changed. The shift from periodic...

Written By: Gargi Sarma Walk into any quick-service restaurant today and you can order at the counter. Open your phone and you can order from the exact same kitchen — only now a delivery platform sits between the restaurant and the customer, taking a cut that ranges anywhere from 15% to 30% of the transaction value. For most operators, that commission is simply accepted as the price of digital reach. But the real cost is not the commission alone. It is what happens when a platform contract...

Written By: Gargi Sarma Here is a question almost nobody asks in a food retail or QSR due diligence: "Do you know if your prices are actually right?" Not right versus the competition. Not right versus cost. Right in the sense that you have tested what customers will actually pay — and priced accordingly. Most haven't. And that gap — between prices set by gut feel or spreadsheet rules, and prices set by real demand data — is quietly worth 100 to 200 basis points of gross margin in almost...