A small bet we tried very hard to kill.
Before writing this page we hired a five-lens red team to attack the plan across three full rounds: 78 attacks, 30 of them rated fatal. The business model below is what survived. It is a modest, cash-oriented operating bet with staged capital and contractual kill criteria. We won't pretend it's a growth story.
How this plan was built
Most restaurant decks are written to be believed. This one was written to be attacked. A research team verified the regulatory, equipment, labor, and market numbers against primary sources (California Health & Safety Code, county plan-check guidance, manufacturer pricing, SEC filings). A red-team panel — skeptical investor, burned operator, regulatory counsel, target customer, franchise buyer — then attacked each draft, and the plan was rewritten after every round.
Two earlier versions of this business died in that process. The original froyo-style self-serve soup wall died on burn liability, waste, and hot-holding economics. The commissary hub with a kitchenless retail spoke died because duplicate rent and labor made it lose money in every scenario we modeled. What follows is the third structure, the first one whose best case makes money.
One kitchen. Three ways to sell what it cooks.
A single ~1,400 sq ft production kitchen in a second-generation restaurant space (existing hood and grease interceptor required; we walk away from sites without them) sells its output through three channels with different demand drivers:
Lunch counter — 55% of revenue
Three soups, 11am–2pm, Monday–Saturday, staff-poured. Cup $6.75, bowl $9.75, toppers and a toasted boule on top. About 71 transactions a day at a ~$8.90 ticket supports the model — a busy but ordinary pace for a good lunch counter, and a number Gate 0 tests before a lease is signed.
Retail case — 28% of revenue
The same soup, blast-chilled the day it's cooked, sealed in pints ($7.50), quarts ($12.50), and half-gallons ($21). Priced against the real comparable — grocery deli soup at $8.99–13.99/lb — and open all day, not just at lunch.
Wholesale — 17% of revenue
Sealed cases to 8–12 local cafés, gyms, and offices at $8.00/quart, delivered by the same crew in off-peak hours. Reorder cycles, not lunch moods. Adding an account costs a sales call and a van stop, not a lease.
Why three channels
Soup demand drops in summer. Modeled blended summer revenue holds at ~72% of the annual average because the case (–15%) and wholesale (–10%) fall far less than the hot counter (–40%). The mix itself is the seasonality plan; the 72% comes out of the channel math, not out of optimism.
Unit economics, with the uncomfortable line items left in
Base case at $30,000/month of revenue, every role priced at market rate including the founder's, employer payroll taxes included:
| Line | $/month | % of revenue |
|---|---|---|
| Revenue (counter + case + wholesale) | 30,000 | 100.0 |
| COGS | 9,900 | 33.0 |
| Labor (lead, associate, delivery) | 8,800 | 29.3 |
| Employer payroll taxes | 790 | 2.6 |
| Workers' compensation | 500 | 1.7 |
| Occupancy | 4,200 | 14.0 |
| Utilities | 1,200 | 4.0 |
| Card processing | 700 | 2.3 |
| Marketing | 900 | 3.0 |
| Insurance, POS, supplies, repairs | 1,800 | 6.0 |
| Packaging | 400 | 1.3 |
| Food-safety/ops advisor (fractional) | 900 | 3.0 |
| Delivery van | 350 | 1.2 |
| EBITDA (accrual) | ≈ –440 | ≈ –1.5 |
| Cash EBITDA (founder draws below market) | ≈ +760 | ≈ +2.5 |
Read that honestly: with everyone paid market rate, the base case loses about $440 a month on paper. It generates about $760 a month in cash because the founder draws $4,000 against the $5,200 his role is charged at. Both numbers are small. The bull case is where the return lives.
| Annualized | Bear | Base | Bull |
|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue | $288,000 | $360,000 | $450,000 |
| EBITDA (accrual) | –$49,500 | –$5,300 | +$44,500 |
| Cash EBITDA | –$35,100 | +$9,100 | +$58,900 |
Use of funds
| Item | Amount |
|---|---|
| Permits, plan check, HACCP, CDPH wholesale registration | $16,000 |
| Architecture / engineering | $14,000 |
| Leasehold improvements (~1,400 sq ft, existing hood targeted) | $115,000 |
| Kitchen production equipment | $58,000 |
| Refrigeration (walk-in, reach-ins, retail case) | $30,000 |
| Counter buildout (hot wells, brass tap manifold for pourable soups, sneeze guard, POS) | $15,000 |
| Grease interceptor (rework of existing, per site gate) | $10,000 |
| Packaging program | $6,000 |
| POS / wholesale ordering tech | $9,000 |
| Smallwares, totes, coolers | $5,000 |
| Used refrigerated delivery van | $18,000 |
| Signage and brand identity (at documented cost) | $8,000 |
| Deposits | $12,000 |
| Pre-opening payroll and training | $15,000 |
| Opening inventory | $6,000 |
| Opening marketing | $10,000 |
| Legal, entity, insurance, investor documents | $10,000 |
| Operating reserve (sized to modeled first-year ramp burn) | $40,000 |
| Contingency (~8%) | $27,000 |
| Total build | $424,000 |
| Raise | $435,000 |
The modeled month-by-month ramp (60% of base revenue in months 1–3, 80% in months 4–6, 100% after) burns roughly $40,000 in year one — which is what the operating reserve is sized to. A slower ramp consumes contingency next, and kill criterion 2 caps how long that's allowed to run.
Your capital deploys in tranches, against evidence
Gate 0 — Validation · Tranche 1: $60,000 · months 0–4
Rented hours in a permitted commercial kitchen plus farmers'-market vending in the actual candidate trade areas. Targets: case sell-through validating $12.50/quart, at least 4 signed pilot wholesale accounts, and a qualified second-generation site with existing hood and interceptor. Miss any of them and the remaining $375,000 is never deployed.
Gate 1 — Buildout · Tranche 2: $265,000 · months 5–11
Releases only on Gate 0 passing in full. Funds the leasehold, kitchen, refrigeration, counter, and permits. A realistic 4–6 month buildout given plan check and HACCP review.
Gate 1b — Opening capital · Tranche 3: $110,000 · at certificate of occupancy
Van, inventory, opening marketing, pre-opening payroll, the $40,000 operating reserve, and contingency. Splitting buildout money from operating money means a stalled buildout can't quietly consume the reserve meant to survive the ramp.
Gate 2 — Prove the year · months 12–24
Four real seasons of data across all three channels, including one full summer, before any expansion conversation.
Gate 3 — Decision · months 25–30
Hold as a small cash business, fund a second self-contained unit separately, or evaluate a co-packed wholesale line. Franchising stays off the table until unit economics clear a real manager's salary plus a royalty — in dollars, not adjectives.
Kill criteria, in writing
- Gate 0 misses: fewer than 4 pilot wholesale accounts, or no qualified second-gen site found.
- Trailing-90-day cash EBITDA below –$5,000/month any time after month 9.
- Summer revenue below 60% of the annual average.
- Fewer than 5 active wholesale accounts after month 12.
- Hood/interceptor buildout overruns budget by more than $40,000 at the selected site.
- Customer behavior shows the format needs seating or menu breadth it doesn't have.
The first four trigger investor wind-down and asset-sale authority. The last two freeze further capital until a re-approved budget or format change. These are terms of the deal, not aspirations in a deck.
The deal, and the straight answer on returns
Structure: $435,000 in Preferred Units of a new operating LLC. Total capitalization is $470,000 — the founder invests $35,000 of his own cash in common units alongside you, subordinate to your preference, last money out. 8% simple, non-compounding preferred coupon; unpaid coupon carries as simple arrears up to five years. Cash beyond the coupon splits 70/30 in your favor until you've recovered 1.5x, then 40/60.
The straight answer: the coupon is $34,800 a year and the base case generates about $9,100 in cash — so in the base case the coupon accrues rather than pays current, and your return depends on the business reaching the bull case or selling as a going concern. In the sustained bull case you receive roughly $51,700 a year, reaching 1.5x in about 12–13 years absent a sale. In a wind-down, asset sales plus the unspent reserve recover perhaps 25–35 cents on the dollar. Nobody should call that a home run, and we don't.
What you're actually buying: priority cash position; kill-criteria authority at every gate; tranches that never expose more capital than the last gate's evidence justified; a founder with his own cash at risk who works in the P&L at a below-market draw; and optionality that costs nothing to hold — wholesale accounts that grow without capital, and a proven unit that would make a second kitchen or a co-packed product line a data-driven decision instead of a leap.
The founder
First-time restaurant operator, and the plan is built so that matters less: his role is priced at market rate in the P&L (the numbers work whether or not he's the one in the kitchen), a fractional food-safety and operations advisor is funded from day one, and he's paid a real salary rather than promising free labor the model would secretly depend on. He contributes $35,000 in cash, personally guarantees the pilot lease, and bills brand and signage work at documented cost with no markup. He also brings the thing this page demonstrates: a willingness to publish the case against his own idea.