September does not only reopen schools. It reopens a time slot.

In September a movement comes back that was not there in August. Kids leaving school at one, hungry and with a few euros in their pocket. Parents looking for something to put in a backpack in the morning. Offices reopening and producing a forty minute lunch break.

That is traffic walking past your venue every day for nine months, and almost always going in somewhere else.

A packed single portion can leave the venue. That is what opens up a customer you did not have before.

The format makes the difference. What you sell loose stays inside the venue: it gets eaten at the counter, and if the customer is in a hurry you lose them. What is already sealed as a single portion travels. It goes into a backpack, it reaches an office, it can be handed to a child without cutting it, and it carries a date that whoever buys for somebody else wants to see.

That is why a slice of cake on a plate and a packed single-portion cake are two different customers, not the same product in two wrappers.

In September three lines do most of the work.

The single-portion sandwich holds the lunch break of people with forty minutes who do not want to sit down. Tramezzini and filled focaccia are picked up by hand and counted by the piece. And then there is the single-portion dessert, the line almost nobody stocks: the after-school snack today gets bought where it is available, not where it would be handier.

The same rule applies to all three. You display them in the morning and count them in the evening, and what is left goes back into the display the next day instead of into the bin.