Client Overview

Focus Brands, now known as GoTo Foods, is a multi brand foodservice platform with a portfolio that includes Auntie Anne’s, Carvel, Cinnabon, Jamba, McAlister’s Deli, Moe’s Southwest Grill, and Schlotzsky’s. For this engagement, Gravitas supported the company’s international business across all portfolio brands and markets outside North America. Leadership needed a better way to monitor performance across a large global franchise network spanning multiple regions, countries, cities, and store formats.

The Challenge

Managing performance across a global quick service restaurant portfolio is complex, especially when leaders need to compare outcomes across brands, geographies, and restaurant types. The client lacked consolidated, near real time visibility into sales, foot traffic, and brand quality across its international operations. Information existed across multiple reports and data sources, but it was difficult to bring it together into one usable view for decision making.

As a result, leadership spent significant time manually identifying underperforming markets, restaurants with quality gaps, and areas where commercial action was needed. Without a unified analytics solution, it was harder to assess how markets were performing, how quality audits connected to sales, and where to prioritize development initiatives such as renovations, rebranding, and expansion.

The Objective

The client engaged Gravitas to build an advanced analytics capability that would help leadership make faster, better informed decisions across the international portfolio. The goal was to create a practical, scalable reporting solution that could improve visibility into restaurant performance, support more consistent brand execution, and uncover opportunities to accelerate franchise growth.

Our Approach

Gravitas partnered with the client to design and launch a Power BI based analytics solution tailored to the realities of a large international QSR franchise network. Rather than starting with static reports, we began by defining the business questions that mattered most to executive and regional leaders. This ensured the solution was built to support decisions, not just reporting.

1. Identifying the business questions that matter most

We worked with leadership to clarify the strategic and operational questions they needed to answer. These included whether foot traffic was rising or declining, which markets were outperforming others, how brand quality affected long term sales, and which products or formats were generating the strongest results. This business first approach helped the client move beyond ad hoc reporting and toward actionable performance management.

2. Structuring the solution around four analytics themes

Gravitas organized the solution around four core areas aligned to leadership priorities.

Sales performance analytics: We created executive views of key metrics including year over year sales growth, planned versus actual sales, and foot traffic. Leaders could drill down by market, region, country, brand, franchisee, and individual restaurant, and compare performance across different location types such as kiosks, airports, university campuses, hospitals, and strip mall locations.

Brand quality analytics: We built dashboards to track quality audit performance, identify recurring issues, and highlight areas for improvement by market or store. The solution also supported correlation analysis between audit performance and sales, helping leadership understand where operational improvements could translate into stronger commercial outcomes.

Product portfolio mix insights: We developed analytics to assess consumer behavior by market and daypart, giving the client clearer visibility into which menu categories, new products, and higher margin offerings were resonating in different markets. This helped leadership evaluate how promotions, product mix, and channel behavior were influencing performance across the portfolio.

Business development visibility: We enabled reporting to support decisions on market investment, new restaurant openings, renovations, and rebranding activity. This gave leadership a more complete view of how development decisions connected to overall market performance.

3. Building momentum without waiting for perfect data

Like many global restaurant organizations, the client faced data quality and consistency challenges across systems and markets. Gravitas helped the team avoid analysis paralysis by identifying which questions could be answered immediately with available data, while also developing a longer term roadmap to improve data quality, depth, and relevance over time. This allowed the client to begin generating value quickly while strengthening its analytics foundation.

4. Delivering a scalable Business Analytics solution leveraging Microsoft PowerBI

Gravitas delivered a cohesive Power BI application that gave executive and regional leaders a unified view of international performance across the portfolio. The dashboards enabled users to move from a high level regional view down to individual markets, countries, cities, and restaurants. We also supported alignment with the client’s broader data architecture so the solution could scale more effectively over time.

The Impact

The final solution gave leadership a clear, centralized view of sales, foot traffic, brand quality, product mix, and business development activity across international markets. Instead of relying on fragmented reports and manual analysis, leaders could quickly identify performance patterns, compare markets, and focus attention on the actions most likely to improve sales and consistency across the franchise network.

By putting actionable insight in the hands of decision makers, the program helped the client improve visibility into growth drivers and contributed to a 12% lift in average regional sales after a 3 month pilot.

Outcomes

12% lift in average regional sales after a 3 month pilot

The analytics solution helped leadership identify growth opportunities faster and make better decisions across brands and markets.

100% ROI

The program delivered full return on investment through improved visibility, better decision support, and reduced manual effort.

350+ leadership hours saved

By consolidating critical reporting and reducing time spent gathering information manually.

3 months to launch

From concept to deployed analytics solution in a rapid implementation timeline.

About Gravitas

Gravitas helps QSR and franchise organizations turn fragmented data into actionable insight. From executive dashboards to portfolio wide performance visibility, we help leaders make faster, smarter decisions that drive growth, consistency, and operational performance across complex multi brand environments.

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Looking to improve visibility across your franchise network?

Gravitas helps QSR and multi brand operators turn fragmented data into actionable insight through executive dashboards, performance analytics, and transformation support. If you are looking to improve sales visibility, brand consistency, and decision making across markets, let’s talk.