Science of Service Episode 16: Scaling  culinary with Michael Sanfilippo

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Growth is the goal. But for restaurant brands, growth has a way of quietly unraveling the very things that made them worth growing in the first place.

More locations mean more kitchens. More kitchens mean more variables. More variables mean more chances for the guest experience to drift, not in one dramatic moment, but slowly, across a hundred small decisions that seem fine in isolation and only reveal themselves as a problem once the damage is done.

That's the challenge Michael Sanfilippo has spent his career navigating. As former Brand Chef and Head of Innovation at Cava, he helped scale one of the fastest-growing restaurant concepts in the country during a pivotal phase of expansion. Now, as Chef in Residence at MarginEdge, he works with operators across different sizes and concepts—and sees the same blind spots come up again and again.

In a recent episode of Science of Service, host Rachel Stainton sat down with Michael to dig into what scaling actually looks like through a culinary lens. The conversation covered consistency, guardrails, simplification, and why the brands that grow well tend to do fewer things, but do them better than anyone else.

This post distills the key lessons from that conversation. Whether you're running one location or planning your tenth, the principles are the same.

Protecting the plate: Why consistency is the real measure of success

Ask any operator what matters most at scale, and "consistency" is usually somewhere in the answer. But understanding it as a concept is very different from building systems that deliver it, every day, across every kitchen.

For Michael, consistency isn't just a quality standard; it's the clearest signal of operational health. "It's always about consistency," he says, "understanding the constraints, understanding the variables, because there are so many variables when you cook today."

Those variables don't live in one place. They show up in sourcing, in training, in equipment, in the way a recipe is interpreted by someone who's been on shift for six hours. At a single location, an experienced chef can compensate for a lot of that. At 50 or 500 locations, you can't rely on individual judgment to carry the whole thing.

That's why what was once instinctive has to become deliberate. The habits that drive consistency: the notebooks, the routines, the relentless focus on getting it right, have to be translated into systems. Discipline becomes documentation. Instinct becomes infrastructure.

Michael traces this mindset back to his time in fine dining and hotel kitchens, where standards were non-negotiable. "I strive for my vision of perfection," he says. And that pursuit wasn't abstract; it was built through repetition, muscle memory, and a growing conviction that if excellence wasn't written down and repeatable, it wasn't really a standard at all.

Simplify before you scale

Here's the advice Michael gives to almost every operator he works with: "Simplify before you scale. Less is more."

It sounds obvious. It rarely gets applied early enough.

As brands grow, the temptation to add more menu items, more SKUs, more complexity is real. New items feel like progress. Each addition seems small and justifiable on its own. But over time, the accumulation creates what Michael calls menu creep, and it silently erodes both operational efficiency and brand clarity.

"You can't just keep adding and adding and adding," he says. "That causes menu creep. That causes dilution to your brand."

He's seen it play out in kitchens of all sizes. He worked with a 30-year-old restaurant that had developed a workaround for their rosé sauce, a half-quart of heavy cream, a splash of tomato, built to order every time. It worked, kind of. But the waste was significant, and the consistency was inconsistent by nature.

The fix was simple: batch the sauce. Pre-make it. Reduce the execution to a single ladle. The result was a dramatic drop in food cost and a more consistent product every time. Nothing about the dish changed. The system around it did.

That's the lens Michael applies to scaling: before you build out, tighten what you already have. Reduce SKUs. Standardize yields. Rationalize the menu. The brands that scale well don't add their way to success; they simplify their way there first.

The innovation lifecycle: From blue sky to reality

None of this means innovation is off the table. But at scale, innovation has to be disciplined, built around a process that tests ideas against reality before they touch the line.

At Cava, that process had a clear shape. It started with blue sky thinking: no constraints, open ideation, exploring what's possible within the brand's flavor world. But it didn't stay there for long.

"From blue sky innovation, it comes to reality," Michael explains. "And then we test at a single restaurant location."

That single-location test wasn't just about whether something tasted good. It was about whether it worked under real conditions, overcooked, held too long, or made by someone unfamiliar with the dish. The goal was to break it on purpose.

"We ask our team members to break it. Tell us what happens if it's overcooked or sitting on the line too long."

From there, successful items moved through controlled location testing, then market tests, then regional tests, then, if everything held, a fleet-wide rollout. Each stage was a gate, not a formality.

The practical discipline here matters. When evaluating a new LTO, Michael isn't only asking whether it tastes good in isolation. He's asking how it behaves with everything else in the bowl, whether it can be sourced consistently across markets, and whether it fits within the cost structure the brand has already committed to.

"If you add one bad ingredient," he says, "you can destroy someone's bowl or someone's experience."

Defining the swim lane: Culinary ethos and brand guardrails

One of the most useful frameworks Michael brought to Cava was the idea of the swim lane: a clear definition of what the brand is, what it isn't, and where it won't go.

"We built the culinary ethos. Brand identity. We said we wanted to be in the Mediterranean. We put ourselves in that swim lane, and then we put up our guardrails."

Those guardrails weren't vague commitments to flavor or quality. They were specific. Certain ingredients would never touch the line. Others defined the brand's flavor range from Greece east through Turkey, Lebanon, and parts of North Africa. The team had a defined space to operate in, and within that space, they had real freedom to push.

This is a crucial distinction. Guardrails aren't creative restrictions; they're creative enablers. When everyone knows what belongs and what doesn't, decisions get faster and better. The team isn't relitigating the brand's identity every time a new idea comes up. They're building within a shared understanding of what the brand actually stands for.

Innovation within the box, as Michael puts it. "You already know the goals that you can't exceed this cost per dressing or this cost per topping. And then you make sure it goes through rigorous tests."

That structure also has significant sourcing implications. Cross-utilizing a spice across multiple menu components isn't just a flavor decision. It increases purchasing volume, reduces costs, and creates consistency in flavor profile across the menu. The guardrails make all of that possible.

Making the familiar fantastic

With a brand ethos in place and guardrails defined, Cava's culinary team operated around a specific philosophy: take something familiar and make it fantastic.

"We would take something that's familiar to people and make it fantastic," Michael says. "Like ranch, we'll use ranch as a base. And we made a za'atar ranch at one of our concepts."

It's a deceptively simple idea that carries a lot of weight. Familiar items reduce friction for guests who are discovering a new brand. Adding a layer of craftsmanship or a distinctive flavor profile gives them something to come back for. The combination builds loyalty without alienating first-timers.

This principle also keeps the menu coherent. Rather than introducing entirely foreign concepts, the brand builds on reference points people already have and elevates them. The result is a guest experience that feels both accessible and distinctive.

Operational variables: Managing complexity across sourcing, training, and equipment

Good food is only as good as the system behind it. And at scale, that system has to account for variables most single-location operators never have to think about.

One of the most impactful changes Michael implemented at Cava was a shift from imperial to metric measurement. The reasoning was precise.

"You take one tablespoon of Diamond Crystal kosher salt, and then you take one tablespoon of Morton's, and you put them on the scale, they're totally different."

Volume-based measurement introduces variance at every step. How tightly something is packed, how a scoop is loaded, whether a cup is level or rounded—all of it shifts the outcome. Weight removes that ambiguity. It also improves food cost accuracy because teams understand exactly what they're working with at each step of the process.

Recipe cards received equal attention. The goal was clarity: short, consistent, using the same technique structure across every recipe so team members weren't starting from scratch each time.

"Even if you have a dressing, you want to make sure the same steps are in each dressing. So it's a technique. You're not doing multiple things."

Yield awareness was another lever. The difference between raw and cooked inputs, the loss when transferring a dressing into a squeeze bottle, the impact of overfilling a grill. These details are easy to overlook at one location and enormously expensive to ignore at scale.

Sourcing added another layer of complexity. Produce is vulnerable to seasonality and acts of nature. Dry ingredients can vary between suppliers in ways that aren't always obvious. Oregano, for instance, comes in Greek and Mexican varieties with meaningfully different flavor profiles, and if procurement makes a substitution without a culinary sign-off, the dish changes without anyone in the kitchen knowing why.

"You can order oregano, but there are two different types of oregano," Michael notes. "You wanna make sure that the product you're getting is the gold standard. And if they do sub it out, you make sure you test that sub."

The balance between growth and guest experience

Pull back far enough, and what Michael describes isn't just a set of operational tactics. It's a philosophy about how brands should grow.

The brands that lose their way don't usually do it in one dramatic decision. They drift. A recipe that lives in someone's head rather than on a card. A process that worked fine at five locations starts breaking at 15. A few extra SKUs that made sense at the time, and now nobody knows how to unwind.

Michael's antidote is simple but demanding: know what you are, build the systems that protect it, and don't grow faster than your infrastructure can support.

"Have a brand identity. Stay within these swim lanes and guardrails. Build yourself a culinary ethos, and then focus on that and rebuild your brand that way."

That means being honest about what's working and what isn't, not just on the plate, but in the walk-in, in the recipe cards, in the labeling, in how ingredients are stored and rotated. It means tasting your food constantly, asking why things went wrong when they did, and building a culture where precision is valued at every level of the team.

The goal isn't perfection as an abstract standard. It's repeatability as a practical outcome. Every guest who walks through the door deserves the same experience as the last one. Building systems that deliver that, across every shift, every kitchen, and every market. That's what separates good brands from great ones.

Growth without that foundation isn't really growth. It's just more locations making the same quiet mistakes at higher volume.

If your brand is preparing to scale, or already scaling and starting to feel the strain, the question worth asking isn't "what can we add?" It's "What do we need to tighten first?"

Start there, and the rest gets a lot more manageable.

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