Cosi Is Good To Go

Chain Leader:

RJ Dourney, who franchises 13 Cosi restaurants in the Boston area, has raised menu prices by 4 percent over the last year. Raising prices is always a suspenseful proposition, but it’s worked out well for Dourney.

“I have seen no guest-count erosion,” says Dourney, a former Au Bon Pain executive who plans to open 12 more Cosi locations.

“That’s really saying something.”

The 4 percent figure wasn’t guesswork. Dourney based it on reports that franchisor Cosi Inc. commissions from Revenue Management Services, a Tampa, Fla.-based consulting firm. The reports, done for each of the fast-casual sandwich concept’s geographical markets, “tell you how much room you have in pricing before you start losing guests,” Dourney says. And that is how he was able to negotiate a price hike, necessary in this age of booming commodities costs, without sacrificing traffic counts.

Commissioning and sharing the price-elasticity reports is just one of the ways Deerfield, Ill.-based Cosi supports franchisees as they become a bigger part of the chain’s growth strategy. More.