Production planning for a pizzeria: from service time to cost per dough ball

The short answer

A pizzeria's production is planned backwards: start from service time and the number of balls, subtract the final proof, the cold and the bulk, and you get the mixing time and the yeast dose. The variable the books forget is the real temperature of the kitchen and the fridge, which changes the fermentation speed by a factor of two between winter and summer. Good practice is to fix a house specification (flour, hydration, salt, target fermentation load), then recompute the hours and the yeast every day from the day's temperature. And to know the cost of every ball, because that is what sets the selling price.

Plan backwards, not from the recipe

Service starts at 5 pm. The balls must be tempered and ready to stretch: two hours of final proof at room temperature for a 270 g ball, so out of the fridge at 3 pm. Before that, the cold: 24, 48 or 72 hours depending on style and flour. Before that again, the bulk, then balling. Each stage has a duration and a temperature, and it is the total fermentation load, not the sum of the hours, that has to reach the style's target. Fornello integrates the yeast's speed curve over each stage, at the temperature you give it, and solves either the hours (how long to reach the target) or the yeast (what dose to get there in the time I have).

The calculator below shows the formula of a pizzeria New York. Enter the number of pizzas and the diameter; at the intermediate level, set the three stages to your real temperatures and watch the yeast follow. The Pro space, for its part, starts from service time and works back.

A worked example: 120 balls of 270 g for a 5 pm service

A New York at 63 % water, 2 % salt, 2.5 % oil and 1.5 % sugar, with 3 % margin for losses. The engine gives 19.7 kg of flour, 12.4 kg of water, 394 g of salt, 493 g of oil and 296 g of sugar for 33.4 kg of dough. The schedule, backwards, for balls rounded before the cold:

The yeast, for its part, is recomputed with the day's kitchen temperature. With this schedule the gap between seasons is moderate, because most of the time is spent cold:

Computed by the Fornello 0.24 engine for 1 h bulk, 24 h at 4 °C and 2 h final proof, 270 g balls, thermal lag included. A same-day production with no cold (4 h bulk, 2 h proof) is far more sensitive: 47 g at 19 °C, 41 g at 22 °C, 34 g at 27 °C.

The lesson is not "use 46 g": it is that the dose is an output of the calculation, not a line of the recipe. What is locked is the schedule and the target load. What changes is the number on the scale, every morning.

The house specification: what is locked, what moves

A pizzeria whose dough changes with whoever is at the mixer has no product. The house specification fixes what must not move: the flour (or blend), hydration, salt, oil, ball weight, target fermentation load and deck temperature. What moves every day is the yeast and the hours, recomputed from temperature. In Fornello's Pro space a specification is locked dimension by dimension: the owner locks salt at 2.2 %, and any attempt to change it downstream is refused with the dimension named in the refusal. A variant (the summer version, the backup-oven version) keeps its parent and records only the deviation.

• Locked: flour, hydration, salt, oil, sugar, ball weight, target load, deck.
• Recomputed every day: yeast dose, mixing time, time out of the fridge.
• Measured, not assumed: kitchen and fridge temperature. A $15 thermometer pays for itself the first week.

The cost of a dough ball, and the price it dictates

The cost of a ball is computed from the formula and purchase prices: flour, water, salt, yeast, oil, then toppings, then packaging. On a 270 g ball the dough itself costs little; cheese and toppings make the cost, and the dough's share of the total is what makes a pizzeria profitable once it controls its toppings. The food cost percentage (ingredient cost divided by selling price) is the figure every owner watches; many aim around 30 %, a common industry benchmark to adjust to your rent and your labour. Fornello computes the cost per ball and per topped pizza from your inventory, then the selling price that reaches the target percentage, on the same screen as the formula.

To make it concrete, here is the calculation on the 270 g ball from the example above, with example prices per kilo that you replace with your own in the inventory: they are orders of magnitude, not surveyed prices.

With these example prices, flour is 85 % of the cost of the dough, and the whole dough costs less than a single slice of cheese. That is why the price of a pizza is decided by toppings and losses, not by the dough, and why the calculator counts toppings by the surface of the pizza.

A gluten-free line, done well

The question comes up often, and rarely for one person: it is a whole table choosing where it eats. A profitable gluten-free line rests on three things: a tested formulation (Fornello builds in eleven, by style, with their guard rails), an anti-contamination protocol (certified flours, dedicated station, rolling pin, peel and baking slot), and a price that reflects the real cost of gluten-free flours, markedly more expensive per kilo. In Italy, where the Ministry of Health counts close to 280,000 diagnosed people and the Associazione Italiana Celiachia estimates the real population at 600,000, more than 4,000 establishments already follow the Alimentazione Fuori Casa programme. In Quebec the offer is thinner, and that is an opportunity.

The production sheet: what the team sees

None of the above is worth anything if the morning team does not have it in front of them. Fornello's printable production sheet (Letter size, white background) gives, for a date and a service: the formula in grams for the day's quantity, the mixing time, the balling time, the time out of the fridge, the deck temperature, and the topping quantities per pizza. One page, one service, no interpretation. That is the difference between a recipe that works when the owner is there and a product that works every night.