How a new deli built $24k+ a month in prepaid sales.
Owner Tom Tarantino
Opened February 2026
Type Deli, market, wine, eatery
Built by Tom + Ezra
Rated 4.8 on Google, 4.6 on Yelp
The starting point
A good kitchen, new to the neighborhood.
Buon Cibo is an Italian deli, specialty market, wine boutique, and eatery owned by Tom Tarantino. It opened in February 2026. Like any new business, it needed ways to bring people in on more than one night and to give them a reason to come back.
Tom and Ezra treated it as the first place to build and test the approach Clear the Plate now offers other owners: decide what to sell with the kitchen, then build the systems that sell it.
What we built
Five parts, in the order they work.
A website is one part of five: the offer, a way to order it, the ads and emails that sell it, the kitchen that makes it, and the count of what actually sold.
01
The offer
What to sell
Friday Dinner for Two, Lasagna Sunday, Heat & Eat meal plans and seated event nights, each with one price and a deadline.
At Buon Cibo78%of online sales came from two offers: the weekly dinner and event tickets
02
Made orderable
How it’s bought
A store Buon Cibo controls, where each offer is paid ahead with a pickup time, a seat, or a kitchen limit.
At Buon Cibo$3,000+in website orders in 30 days placed between 8 PM and 9 AM, while the doors were closed
03
Promoted
Who hears about it
Facebook and Instagram ads and weekly emails for whatever is open now, sent to the people most likely to buy it.
At Buon Cibo$1 →brought back$10.46in sales from the ads, in their best full week of October
04
Fulfilled
How the kitchen makes it
Orders print in the kitchen with counts, pickup times, and guest lists, so each night runs to a plan.
At Buon Cibo200+dinners from a single Friday, sold as dinners for two
05
Measured
What actually sold
Every order counted from the store’s own records, new and returning customers apart, with Meta’s reports read beside them.
At Buon Cibo57%of weekly dinner customers reordered within 90 days, counted customer by customer
Each part makes the next one work.
An offer nobody hears about doesn’t sell, and a sale nobody counts can’t be repeated. All five run every week at Buon Cibo.
More first orders. More repeat business. More of the money from regulars.
We track Buon Cibo’s online orders customer by customer. Here’s what six months of them show.
New customers
127%
more first-time online buyers in a month than in the month before
The month before
The next month
Paid orders rose 87% over the same two months.
Online order value rose 71% over the same months.
Coming back
57%
of weekly dinner customers reordered within 90 days
30 days34%
60 days45%
90 days57%
Counts only customers who had a full 90 days to come back.
39% of everyone who has ever bought it has ordered it again.
Bigger orders
$10–$22
more on each preorder dinner order that adds a salad or a dessert
Dinner for two$35.00
With both$56.99
40% of preorder dinner orders add one. That’s an example cart above, not a real order.
We measure who buys, who orders again, and where the money really comes from. Read how we measured it →
What we learned
Count what was bought, not what was clicked.
01
Count the order, not the page
Some orders that started on the Friday dinner page had no Friday dinner in them. Dinners are counted from what’s in the order, not from where the visit began.
02
Keep the dish it sold as
The Friday dinner page is reused every week with a new dish. Each order keeps the dish it was bought as, so last month’s dinner is never counted as this week’s.
03
A regular comes back another day
Two orders in one checkout aren’t a returning customer. Someone only counts as coming back when they order again on a later day.
04
Meta counts its own sales
Meta reports the purchases it thinks its ads drove. The store’s orders say what was actually bought. We read the two side by side, and the store’s orders decide.
Who built it
The two people behind every number on this page.
Tom runs the kitchen side of Buon Cibo. Ezra built and runs its website, ads and emails. You work with the same two people.
Tom Tarantino
Award-winning restaurant owner
Tom has run restaurants, a deli and a market in San Diego for more than 30 years. He looks at what your kitchen can produce, what it costs, how it’s presented, and whether your team can deliver it every time.
Grew up in Little Italy, in a Sicilian fishing family here since the early 1900s
Ezra started with Tom a year before Buon Cibo opened and built its selling side from nothing. He connects an offer to how people find it, buy it, hear from you again, and come back.
Shaped Buon Cibo’s concept and brand with Tom, a year before opening
Built its website, its online ordering and the tracking behind every sale
Runs its Facebook and Instagram ads and its weekly emails
Ezra’s results at Buon Cibo
$24k+a month in online orders, through the website he built
$6,000+in sales from email, in 30 days
$1 →brought back $10.46from the ads in their best full week of October
What this means for you
We won’t copy Buon Cibo. We’ll use what we learned there.
Your menu, prices, and schedule should fit your kitchen and your customers. What carries over is the method: plan it with the kitchen, build the buying path, follow up, and measure.
$24k+ a month is preorder dinners, event tickets and meal plans bought on Buon Cibo’s website, across its old and new stores, in September 2026, with October on pace to pass it. It isn’t total store revenue or profit, and it leaves out catering.
$1 → $10.46 is the purchase value Meta Ads Manager reports for every $1 spent in Buon Cibo’s best full week of October 2026, Monday to Sunday. Meta’s count isn’t the same as the store’s own, and sales from ads aren’t profit.
$10 and $4 are Meta’s cost per purchase for the new-customer and returning-customer campaigns in that same week, rounded, and the returning-customer campaign brought back $12.98 for every $1. First orders from the ads averaged $69 and regulars’ orders $53.
$994 → $4,036 a night, about 4× in six weeks, is one weekly dinner program’s online sales per night, from Buon Cibo’s own online orders. It has held at that level since.
39% of everyone who has bought that weekly dinner online has ordered it again, March to September 2026. We count customers by email address, leave out cancelled, refunded and zero-value orders, and only count a repeat when the second order is on a later day.
78% is the weekly dinner and event tickets as a share of everything sold online, add-ons not counted, mid-March to mid-October 2026.
+127% is first-time online buyers in the 28 days to our September 2026 snapshot against the 28 days before; paid orders rose 87% and online order value 71% over the same two periods. A first-time online buyer is first seen in online orders, not necessarily a first-time guest.
57% of weekly dinner customers reordered within 90 days (34% within 30, 45% within 60). It only counts customers who had a full 90 days to come back.
40% and $10 to $22: the share of preorder dinner orders with a salad or dessert added, in Shopify orders since late September 2026. One add-on is $10 to $12; a salad and a dessert together is about $22.
15% and $3,000+ are website orders placed between 8 PM and 9 AM Pacific in the 30 days to October 19, 2026.
200+ dinners came from one Friday in September, sold as dinners for two and counted as two dinners each.
$6,000+ in 30 days is sales from Buon Cibo’s seven emails sent September 28 to October 19, 2026, counted to October 21, as Shopify reports them, rounded down; $1,500+ is a single email, for a seated event night. 1,500 is the list on opening day, and the average open rate across those emails is 62%.
Ratings are Buon Cibo’s Google Business Profile (4.8 stars) and Yelp (4.6 stars), October 2026.
RoVino’s awards are as reported by SDVoyager and OpenTable.
Online prepaid sales only, not total store revenue. Buon Cibo is our founding example, not a client portfolio, and we don’t promise the same results or timeline.
