Ask most franchise owners how they feel about a pricing change handed down from corporate, and the honest answer usually involves some combination of suspicion, resistance, and a slow walk toward compliance. Multi-unit systems have tried committees, mandates, and system-wide averages to force alignment, and franchisees have pushed back on all three, often for good reason. Patrick Daprile and Dhruv Nathwani built their company, Quantiiv, around a different premise: franchise owners do not need to be told what to do with their pricing. They need to see why it works.
Daprile and Nathwani walked Franchise Brief through that philosophy, along with the case study that put it to the test. Working with Beyond Juicery + Eatery, a fast-casual smoothie and juice franchise that had grown to more than 50 locations, Quantiiv helped the brand adjust prices without losing customer traffic, and within six months, every franchise owner in the system had opted in. Not most. All of them.
Built by People Who Priced Coffee for a Living
Daprile and Nathwani met at Starbucks, where Daprile worked on the menu pricing team and Nathwani worked in portfolio analytics and strategy. Both are trained engineers, an unlikely background for selling coffee and pastries, but pricing at that scale turned out to be equal parts psychology and math. Quantiiv’s name reflects that split: a combination of quantitative and qualitative, or what Nathwani calls “blending the art with the science.” This philosophy was born in the early days of the Starbucks pricing team. “We had no idea if our stores were overpriced, underpriced, or how customers responded to a price increase,” Daprile said. It was from this observation the team had to build a pricing discipline inside a company-owned system.
That team generated more than a billion in incremental revenue with minimal loss in customer traffic, a track record that came from measuring, with precision, what a customer would actually pay for a given product in a given location. “It’s a superpower,” Daprile said of that capability. When it came time for a new challenge, the two co-founders wanted to bring that same discipline, honed across a $20 billion food-and-beverage portfolio, to restaurant brands that had never had access to it: growing, multi-unit concepts and the franchise owners who run their locations day to day.
The Trouble with Averages
Most restaurant brands price one of three ways, and Quantiiv encourages clients to move away from all of them. Cost-plus pricing marks up the expense of making a product. Geographic pricing adjusts for real estate, assuming a location in California should cost more than one in Ohio. Competitive pricing benchmarks against rivals, on the assumption that a brand’s positioning, more premium or more value, should be worth a fixed percentage either way. “Customers don’t know your costs, nor do they care,” Daprile said, and the other two methods carry their own blind spots. Two competing burger chains rarely sell an identical product, so any comparison is really a guess dressed up as a strategy.
Quantiiv’s alternative is value-based pricing: understanding what a brand’s own transaction history says customers are actually willing to pay, at every touchpoint that shapes how a guest experiences the brand, from the ordering app to the cleanliness of the dining room to the friendliness of the staff at the register. Applying that philosophy well means resisting the pull toward system-wide averages. A number pulled from a spreadsheet and rolled up across every location looks clean, but it erases the store-by-store differences that value-based pricing depends on to work.
A Lesson From Two Sides of the Freeway
Nathwani offers a favorite example to illustrate what averages miss. Take two stores from the same coffee brand, sitting on opposite sides of a freeway, selling the identical product mix in the identical trade area. On paper, they are the same business. In the data, they are not. “There’s strength in very different places and there’s strength in often unintuitive places, which is really, really interesting,” Nathwani said. “One of them actually quantitatively has way more pricing strength than the other” depending on time of day.
Occasion explains the difference. On the morning commute side, guests arrive wanting, in Nathwani’s words, to “give me my coffee and my breakfast sandwich on the way to work,” a functional mindset that has already decided the value is worth it and barely registers a price change. Swap to the evening commute side, and the customer turns more indulgent, reaching for something sweeter after a long day, with a different sense of what feels fair to pay. One freeway, two occasions, two entirely different pricing plans, discovered only by looking at the location level instead of the system average.
Trust Is the Real Currency in a Franchise System
Everything Quantiiv built at Starbucks came with one advantage a franchise brand does not have: a company-owned system with tight controls and no outside partners to convince. Franchising adds a layer that pricing strategy alone cannot solve. “I think the most important aspect is trust,” Daprile said. “Because you’re franchise partners.” A franchise owner who feels like a recommendation was handed down without explanation has every reason to ignore it, delay it, or quietly do something else instead.
Building that trust, in Daprile and Nathwani’s experience, is less about grand gestures and more about treating each franchise owner like a partner who deserves to see the reasoning. Quantiiv’s approach centers on showing franchise owners exactly what a pricing recommendation would mean for their specific location, backed by their own transaction history, rather than asking them to accept a system-wide number on faith. That distinction, evidence over mandate, became the foundation for Quantiiv’s work with Beyond Juicery + Eatery.
Beyond Juicery + Eatery Puts the Approach to the Test
Beyond Juicery + Eatery, a fast-casual smoothie and juice concept that began franchising in 2018, had grown to more than 50 locations by the time the two companies started working together. Growth at that pace had scattered pricing decisions across markets, and franchise owners were often left reacting to rising costs only after their margins had already started to shrink.
Daprile credits the brand’s leadership for getting ahead of the problem before it became one. “The Beyond team is excellent,” he said. Rather than waiting for franchise owners to raise concerns, the franchisor wanted concrete guidance in hand first, in Daprile’s words, to “be on the front foot here.” Quantiiv’s process started where it always does: two to three years of historical transaction data, reviewed store by store, to understand what pricing moves had worked in the past and where the system still had room to learn.
Proving It Before Scaling It
Before recommending a change across the system, Quantiiv tests it. If a menu category shows signs of price sensitivity, the team looks at what happened historically in that category before touching it again. Locations are also grouped into holdback zones, stores that receive no price changes, so the results elsewhere have a clean comparison point. That counterfactual removes the guesswork. If the priced locations perform better than the holdback group, the brand has proof, not a hunch.
That empirical foundation let Beyond Juicery + Eatery move fast without moving recklessly. Each recommendation carried its own evidence, tied to the specific store or cluster of stores it applied to. Quantiiv was not asking franchise owners to trust the system; it was showing them their own numbers.
From Early Wins to Full Adoption
Results built momentum quickly. “It’s like a snowball starting to roll downhill,” Daprile said, describing how each successful price adjustment made the next one easier to accept. Franchise owners who saw a recommendation pay off in their own store became advocates for the next one, and within six months, every franchise owner across the Beyond Juicery + Eatery system had adopted the new pricing approach.
Jasmine Miller, CEO of Beyond Juicery + Eatery, credits that adoption to the same transparency Quantiiv builds its process around. “Franchise owners are entrepreneurs,” Miller said. “They want to understand why a pricing decision is being made before they embrace it. Quantiiv gave us the transparency and the insights to answer those questions.” Elasticity improved by 70 percent, meaning guests grew less sensitive to price changes over time, and the brand is on track to generate additional margin this year from the pricing work alone, without opening new locations or cutting costs.
When the Data Held Steady
That same data proved its worth under pressure. When a government shutdown in November 2025 dampened consumer spending across the restaurant category, Beyond Juicery + Eatery leadership could see, from its own performance data, that the slowdown reflected broader market conditions rather than a problem specific to its restaurants. Instead of second-guessing the pricing strategy or reacting to short-term noise, the brand held its course.
“One of the biggest challenges for any restaurant brand is knowing when to act and when to stay the course,” Miller said. “Having objective pricing insights and performance data helped us avoid reacting to short-term market noise and stay focused on what was actually happening inside restaurants.” For a franchise system, that kind of clarity carries weight beyond a single quarter. Current franchise owners see a brand that stays steady under pressure rather than reacting rashly, and prospective owners see the kind of support they can expect once they sign on.
A System Built to Scale Trust
Centralizing pricing data across a franchise system creates an advantage no single location can replicate on its own. “You have such a data advantage when you centralize your pricing strategy,” Daprile said, describing how aggregating results across every store lets Quantiiv identify opportunities that a five-location decision, built on five locations’ worth of information, would never surface.
A cornerstone of the system is Franchisors’ ability to interact directly with ROGER, Quantiiv’s AI agent, to explore store data, alongside one-on-one conversations with the Quantiiv team when a specific pricing question calls for it. That evidence-based approach extends well past pricing. Quantiiv applies similar methods to site selection, product mix, and testing new menu items, including limited-time offers that, as Nathwani noted, tend to re-anchor customers to a higher price point on the core menu around them. A facility refresh, a new product launch, a seasonal promotion: each one shows up in the data, and each one becomes part of the same evidence-based conversation with franchise owners.
Still young and growing fast, Quantiiv’s tools remain purpose-built for restaurants for now, though Daprile and Nathwani see the same philosophy applying anywhere in fragmented, multi-location retail. Its founders describe the current moment as one where technology finally allows this kind of granular, location-by-location pricing science to run at scale. “This wasn’t possible 5 years ago,” Daprile said.
Pricing as a Muscle
Nathwani sums up the underlying philosophy in a single line: “Pricing’s a muscle, and it’s a muscle that you continue exercising on a regular basis.” Done carelessly, that muscle can strain a customer relationship. Done with evidence behind it, exercised consistently and validated store by store, it becomes one of the more reliable growth levers a franchise system has.
“Precision comes from understanding what’s driving customer behavior at each location, not relying on system averages that can mask important differences,” Nathwani said. “That’s the difference between a pricing strategy that delivers real results and a recommendation that’s not relevant in practice; and it’s why we saw 100% adoption.” For Beyond Juicery + Eatery, and for the franchise owners inside that system, the number that mattered most was never really about price. It was about being shown the truth of their own business, one store at a time.
