There is a point in the growth of most food businesses where the kitchen that got you here stops being the thing that takes you further. Usually it arrives somewhere between the fifth and the fifteenth outlet, and it arrives as a consistency problem before it arrives as a cost problem.
The consistency argument comes first
With three outlets you can train every cook yourself. With fifteen you cannot, and the dish that made your reputation starts to taste slightly different depending on which branch a customer walks into. Central production solves this in a way that training programmes and recipe cards do not, because it removes the variable rather than managing it.
Then the cost argument
The comparison people usually run is ingredient cost against unit price, and on that basis in-house often looks cheaper. It is the wrong comparison, because it leaves out most of the real costs: kitchen space rented at retail rates, back-of-house labour, equipment depreciation, waste from over-prep, and the management time spent on production rather than on customers.
Run it properly — fully loaded cost per portion, including the square footage — and the crossover point tends to arrive earlier than operators expect.
What you give up
It is worth being honest about the trade. You lose the ability to change a recipe on a whim, and you take on minimum order quantities and lead times. For a business whose menu changes monthly, that is a poor fit. For one built on a stable core menu, it is barely a constraint.
A sensible way to test it
Start with one dish — ideally your highest-volume, most labour-intensive item. Have it developed to match your existing recipe, run a pilot batch, and put it into two outlets alongside the in-house version. You will know within a month whether customers notice, and you will have real numbers rather than a spreadsheet estimate.
That is how most of our OEM relationships have started. Tell us what you are making and we will tell you honestly whether it is worth moving.