Operations
Tremendous Bowl Sunday serves as a high-stakes stress check that reveals whether or not a restaurant has constructed the scalable, automated programs obligatory to show excessive peak quantity into a typical every day operation fairly than a once-a-year disaster.
Picture: Adobe Inventory (AI generated)
February 5, 2026 by Christian Wiens — Co-Founder & CEO, Loman AI
The restaurant business waits all yr for Tremendous Bowl Sunday. For pizza eating places particularly, it is the championship sport of operational excellence. A single day that poses the last word check of whether or not your programs can deal with excessive quantity, and for some, that may make or break annual efficiency.
However this is what most individuals do not understand: for high-performing pizza operations, Tremendous Bowl Sunday is not an anomaly. It is a stress check that reveals which eating places have constructed programs able to dealing with championship-level quantity each single day.
The stakes are greater than you assume
Tremendous Bowl Sunday persistently ranks among the many prime 5 gross sales days of the yr for pizza eating places. The operational problem is easy: huge quantity focus in a brief window.
Take into account the maths. On a typical Sunday, your restaurant would possibly course of 50 orders. If Tremendous Bowl Sunday generates even 5 occasions that quantity – a conservative estimate given business stories of the day’s significance – you are taking a look at 250 orders. At a mean ticket of $45, that is $11,250 in comparison with your typical $2,250 Sunday.
However this is the place the maths will get extra attention-grabbing. There are 52 Sundays in a yr. If a traditional Sunday represents roughly 2% of your annual Sunday income, a day producing 5 occasions regular quantity represents 10% of your whole Sunday income, in a single day. And plenty of operators report Tremendous Bowl efficiency effectively above 5 occasions regular quantity.
The distinction between capturing that income and shedding it typically comes right down to a easy query: are you able to truly reply the telephone?
Why championship operations assume in a different way
The intuition when getting ready for Tremendous Bowl Sunday is easy: add extra workers to deal with extra calls. Herald additional palms, lengthen shifts, perhaps pull somebody from the kitchen to assist with telephones.
However the eating places that dominate sport day know this strategy fails exactly if you want it most. Coaching high quality telephone workers takes weeks. Even with satisfactory staffing, you hit bodily limits. What number of telephone strains do you could have? What number of simultaneous calls can your crew deal with earlier than clients get busy alerts? Throughout peak hours, you are competing towards the shopper’s willingness to attend on maintain, and their endurance is measured in seconds.
Championship operations do not depend on heroic staffing efforts. They’ve eradicated the telephone bottleneck solely. When each name is answered instantly and processed effectively, no matter what number of different calls are coming in, the telephone transforms from legal responsibility to asset. Employees concentrate on meals high quality and in-restaurant service whereas the telephone handles itself.
These operators perceive that Tremendous Bowl Sunday simply amplifies challenges they face each Friday dinner rush, each March Insanity lunch particular, each short-staffed evening. They’ve constructed programs the place dealing with excessive name quantity is customary process, not a once-a-year scramble.
The widening hole
Buyer expectations within the restaurant business are set by the most effective performers. When somebody calls a pizza restaurant and will get a right away reply, correct service, and a seamless ordering expertise, that turns into their baseline expectation all over the place.
The problem is that clients do not evaluate you to your direct opponents down the road. They evaluate you to the most effective expertise they’ve ever had. This creates a widening hole within the business. The eating places which have constructed championship-caliber operations are elevating the bar for everybody. The eating places nonetheless counting on conventional staffing fashions for telephone protection are falling additional behind.
In a commoditized market the place clients can order pizza from half a dozen locations inside a three-mile radius, operational excellence is not a nice-to-have. It is the one sustainable aggressive benefit.
What Tremendous Bowl Sunday actually reveals
Tremendous Bowl Sunday does not create operational challenges. It reveals them.
The eating places that thrive on sport day accomplish that as a result of they’ve constructed programs the place championship-level efficiency is their baseline. They’ve acknowledged that the telephone — traditionally probably the most hectic a part of high-volume days—could be reworked into their most dependable asset.
Making ready for Tremendous Bowl Sunday misses the purpose. Construct operations that work every single day, and sport day takes care of itself. As a result of in an business the place clients have limitless choices and nil endurance for busy alerts, the eating places that deal with peak efficiency as customary working process are those that win, not simply on sport day, however three hundred and sixty five days a yr.
About Christian Wiens
Christian Wiens is the Founder and CEO of Loman AI, the main Voice AI platform for eating places. Since founding the Austin-based firm in 2024, Christian has scaled Loman to serve clients nationwide, processing tens of hundreds of thousands so as quantity and serving to eating places seize extra income whereas lowering labor prices.
