Georgia’s restaurant sector remains one of the most dynamic segments of the economy in 2025. According to the National Statistics Office of Georgia, 9,826 restaurants, cafés, and bars are currently registered in the country, and the market continues to expand following the opening of more than 1,100 new catering outlets in 2024, primarily in Tbilisi and Batumi. This growth is reinforced by rising consumer spending. Data from TBC Capital shows that in November 2025, non-cash restaurant spending increased 34% year-on-year, while the average transaction value of non-residents was nearly five times higher than that of local customers.
In this environment, success increasingly depends on a clear understanding of location economics, customer behavior, tourist flows, and urban constraints. It is against this backdrop that the Dodo Pizza chain is scaling up in Georgia – under the leadership of renowned entrepreneur Viacheslav Prokudin, for whom restaurant growth has long been a calculated, system-driven process.
Viacheslav Prokudin is a master franchisee and CEO of Vitagold LLC (known under the brand name Dodo Pizza), one of the first partners of the brand in Russia, and the first master franchisee of Dodo Pizza in Georgia. In 2016, he entered this business not on a wave of franchise fashion, but through hands-on management in one of the most challenging restaurants markets in the CIS. Over the years, under his leadership, a pizzeria chain with annual revenue exceeding more than 13 million dollars was built, a strong management team was formed, and a scaling model based on data rather than intuition was refined. Under his leadership, two pizzerias were opened in Georgia in 2024 (in Tbilisi and Batumi). Two additional pizzerias in Tbilisi have just opened, and a fifth project is currently under way.
How Viacheslav Prokudin developed controlled growth in the catering industry
In the chain restaurant business, scaling rarely begins with high-profile openings. More often than not, it starts with mistakes, intense competition, and the need to build an economy in an environment where weak decisions are punished quickly. Highly saturated markets are becoming a kind of “survival school” for entrepreneurs: it is there that it becomes clear which formats work and which do not, and exactly what must be standardized before expansion.
It was in this context that Viacheslav Prokudin’s managerial approach took shape. His career in the restaurant business began with the launch and hands-on management of Dodo pizzerias across the Moscow region. This experience largely shaped the logic behind his subsequent decisions in building the business and developing a management team.
“At the initial stage of launching the projects, we analyzed markets with the greatest potential – primarily large cities with populations of 200.000 or more, as well as the metropolitan districts. When selecting locations, it is also crucial to implement a unified restaurant format, with consistent standards for interior design, menu, and service – an approach we successfully applied in Moscow and the Moscow region,” Prokudin commented.
Over the years, a network of eleven restaurants in this region was built under Prokudin’s management. The average monthly revenue of a single pizzeria, according to internal documents, was approximately more than 150.000 dollars, with one outlet ranking No. 1 in revenue across this region network, reaching more than 260.000 dollars per month. Collectively, the network generates more than one million orders per year, and like-for-like growth exceeded 25% annually. Income speaks for itself: the consolidated revenue of restaurants under the management of Viacheslav Prokudin increased by 35% over the last year and amounted to almost 18 million dollars in 2025. And this year it is planned to increase this income by another 18 percent.
The commercial success of the restaurants managed by Prokudin was driven not only by strong locations, but also by a deeply customized operational model built around the Dodo IS CRM system. It was a modification of the network’s standard system and adapted by Viacheslav’s team to the new formats of their restaurants. Unlike universal CRM solutions, Dodo IS was designed specifically for online catering and delivery, tracking the full lifecycle of each order – from acceptance and preparation to delivery. The system monitors customer behavior, repeat purchases, churn, stop lists, kitchen load, and lost revenue, while also forecasting raw material requirements based on actual demand. For management, Dodo IS functions not merely as a reporting platform, but as a real-time control tool, enabling teams to detect deviations early and make decisions before they impact financial performance. Subsequently, many other franchisees implemented this concept too.
“We brought in IT specialists to build this system, integrating automated management accounting that accelerated processes by up to 90%. Over time, many other franchisees across the chain adopted this approach,” Viacheslav Prokudin shared.
This stage laid the foundation for the further growth of the pizzeria chain. Experience gained in a highly competitive environment made it clear which indicators truly matter when scaling a business. The Prokudin’s model developed abroad has been applied for expansion in Georgia, taking into account a new market environment and regulatory constraints. This approach marked the beginning of the brand development in Georgia.
How Prokudin applied the old principles to the new market
The Georgian branch of Dodo Pizza was initially considered by Viacheslav not as an experiment, but as a test of whether the management model developed in a mature market could work in a new country. The first discoveries in Georgia confirmed this calculation in practice. The pizzeria opened in Batumi in March 2024 already showed approximately 172.000 dollars in revenue in its first month of operation – the highest launch result among more than 240 restaurants in the Dodo Pizza chain abroad – and reached operating profitability from the very first month.
Development in Tbilisi follows the same logic – through controlled, managed scaling rather than rapid growth at any cost. At present, the Prokudin-managed chain operates 15 pizzerias across Russia and Georgia, while the Georgian market remains in an active expansion phase. One restaurant was opened in Tbilisi and one in Batumi in 2024, two new pizzerias in Tbilisi have just opened, another location is scheduled to launch in February, with a lease agreement already secured. In parallel, negotiations are ongoing for additional premises for future restaurants. This comprehensive approach enables the distribution of investment load and allows the economic performance of each new location to be assessed in advance.
According to Viacheslav Prokudin, the sustainability of each pizzeria remains a core principle: locations are not opened for the sake of scale alone. That is why the Georgian business was built with a full-fledged operational infrastructure from the outset – spanning supply and logistics, quality control, and staff training.
Adapting to the local market required particular attention. Some supply chains were established within Georgia, while others were developed in partnership with international suppliers, allowing the business to maintain quality standards while keeping the costs under control. Teams were trained in line with the network’s standards, while also taking local specifics into account.
“It was not enough simply to attract investment to open pizzerias in Georgia. We secured and established a supply and logistics system, implemented a quality control framework, and signed a contract with the largest manufacturer of gas stoves in Turkey,” Prokudin said.
As a result, the Georgian pizzerias under Prokudin’s management are not isolated locations, but part of a unified management system in which financial performance, operational metrics, and customer experience are measured according to the same principles applied in more mature markets. This is what makes further business development in Georgia a logical next stage in scaling a proven model.
At the same time, it is important to recognize that successful scaling does not happen spontaneously. It requires a clear understanding of how and where expansion is possible, grounded in data, systems, and experience – not assumptions.
How data, not intuition, drives Prokudin’s location strategy
As the pace of new restaurant openings accelerates and obvious locations become increasingly scarce, intuition is no longer a reliable decision-making tool. At this stage, the special analytical model, developed under Viacheslav Prokudin’s leadership, comes into play. Today, decisions on opening new pizzerias are made based on this model, which replaces subjective judgment with data-driven analysis.
This analytical model was designed as an applied management scheme for a specific purpose: identifying restaurant locations with a high probability of achieving sustainable unit economics. It follows a hierarchical logic, moving from citywide demand patterns to the evaluation of specific districts and individual premises, directly linking strategic insights with operational decision-making.
“The core principle of the model is working with multiple independent data layers simultaneously. Rather than relying on a single indicator, the analysis combines demographic data, infrastructure characteristics, delivery activity, and operational metrics from existing restaurants. This approach reduces the risk of distortion and makes it possible to see the true structure of the market”, Prokudin shared.
Geographical analysis plays a central role in the model. Heatmaps are used as indicators of kitchen activity rather than direct demand, helping to avoid overestimating highly visible but underperforming locations and to identify areas that are often overlooked. Importantly, the analysis is conducted at the level of individual restaurants rather than brands, revealing which locations perform sustainably on their own.
Another element of Viacheslav Prokudin’s approach is the structural segmentation of the market into chain and independent restaurants, with each segment quantified by share. This provides a more accurate picture of the competitive landscape and the degree of market fragmentation, as well as a realistic assessment of entry and scaling potential.
Final priority zones are identified through the intersection of several strong signals – an intersection analysis – after which they are benchmarked against the network’s existing pizzerias. This step is essential for validating the model in practice and refining it as new data accumulates. At the same time, the model explicitly documents the assumptions and limitations of the underlying data in advance, which is critical for management use. The model does not claim absolute precision; rather, it establishes a transparent and disciplined framework for decision-making.
As a result, this strategy becomes a connecting tissue of the entire growth trajectory: the commercial performance of existing pizzerias, experience accumulated in a mature market, and a data-driven approach to site selection together form a single, coherent system. This makes it possible to scale without losing manageability and to reduce expansion risks – an increasingly critical competitive advantage of large businesses operating in an environment of intensifying competition.
The case of Dodo Pizza in Georgia illustrates how the restaurant industry is evolving in markets that are still growing yet already highly competitive. Rapid expansion alone is no longer a guarantee of success; what matters instead is the ability to turn each new opening into a deliberate management decision – grounded in data, operational metrics, and a clear understanding of local demand.
For Viacheslav Prokudin, Georgia has become a practical test of a management approach forged in a far more saturated market. Strong commercial results, system-level analytics, and disciplined decision-making have enabled the chain to scale without relying on intuition or short-term hype. In a restaurant sector where mistakes are costly and margins are increasingly sensitive to location and execution, this approach may ultimately prove more valuable than aggressive expansion itself.
By Daria Iv
