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Restaurant site selection
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United Kingdom
Restaurant site selection with UK footfall and dayparts
Check lunch and evening footfall, dwell time and catchment at any UK site before you commit, and see which food and drink brands already trade nearby.
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Up to 5 locations. No cost, no commitment.
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Restaurant site selection depends on who is around at the times you trade, and Huq measures it for any UK address. See footfall by daypart, dwell time, catchment and the food and drink brands nearby, for vacant units and rivals' sites alike. PizzaExpress combined Huq's monthly footfall with its own sales across 370+ UK stores to separate location problems from operational ones.
Using Huq for restaurant site selection
The overview is a general tour of the platform. With a restaurant in mind, watch for two things: where a location's footfall is broken down by time of day and day of week, and how the Explore map shows brands and industries around a site. Together they answer whether a unit is busy when you would trade, and who you would compete with for covers.
- Footfall by daypart and day of week at a single site
- Food and drink brands and industries around a location
- Dwell time and residents versus visitors near a unit
Trusted by 300+ organisations · Data across 35 markets
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What is restaurant site selection?
Restaurant site selection is choosing where to open a new restaurant, café or bar. It shares a lot with retail site selection, but timing matters more. A unit that is busy at 11am on a weekday can be empty at 8pm, and a café that lives on breakfast commuters needs a very different site from a dinner-led restaurant.
UK operators also weigh who is around. Office workers, shoppers, tourists and local residents behave differently, and a high street, a retail park and a station concourse each mix them in different ways. Dwell time shows whether people linger long enough to eat, and the catchment shows how far they will travel.
Huq gives you that evidence for any address, so you can compare candidate units on footfall by daypart, see which food and drink brands already trade nearby, and benchmark new sites against your strongest branches.
What's in your restaurant site selection analysis
01
Footfall by daypart
Footfall by time of day and daypart, plus weekday versus weekend patterns, for every candidate unit.
02
Dwell time
How long people stay in the area, a useful pointer to sit-down versus grab-and-go demand.
03
Residents and visitors
Split locals from visitors and see the catchment by postcode for each candidate site.
04
Nearby food and drink brands
Brand locations and industries around each unit, so you know who you're competing with.
What a restaurant site selection analysis shows
Three views that matter most to restaurant and café operators.
01
Dayparts for a candidate unit
See footfall by time of day and day of week, so you can check the site is busy when your restaurant actually trades.
02
Brands around the site
The Explore map shows food and drink brands and industries nearby, to judge competition and complementary trade.
03
Benchmark against your best branches
Compare a candidate with existing restaurants whose sales you know, and export the comparison to Excel.
Restaurant site selection data for any UK location
Huq covers any address in the UK: high streets, shopping centres, retail parks, competitors' stores and sites you haven't opened yet. No counters, sensors or cameras needed.
Huq manually validates more than 1,000 locations in each of its 35 markets twice a year, and data refreshes weekly.
How it works
Step 1
Tell us your locations
Add up to five addresses in the form. Your own stores, candidate sites or competitors.
Step 2
We run the analysis
Our team maps each location from observed visitor data.
Step 3
We walk you through it
A short call to take you through what the data shows and what it means for you.
Why UK operators use Huq for restaurant site selection
- Huq publishes its accuracy by country: an 18.7% median error in Great Britain against landlord-reported footfall.
- JD Sports, a UK retailer, got 25% more precise catchment analysis and 18% lower new-store location risk.
- Ripon BID saw footfall up 164% year on year.
- Trusted by 300+ organisations across 35 markets, including the global insights, research and location intelligence teams at Nike, Adidas, JD Sports and Samsung.
huq's platform gave us valuable data to support a key decision on potential new sites.
Dan Brogden
National Sales Manager, Puccinos
Who it's for
01
Retail chains of any size
From five-store retailers planning their next site to global brands: choose locations, track store performance and benchmark against competitors.
02
Retail property owners
Show centre performance, support leasing and get the tenant mix right, for landlords, asset managers and brokers.
03
Investors and private equity
Check how retail brands and assets actually perform before you buy, and monitor them after.
Everything Huq measures, in one platform
- Footfall: by week, month and year, with totals, average daily footfall, trends, period-on-period change, and visiting vs passing traffic.
- Residents and visitors.
- Catchment and travel time: catchment by postcodes, plus drive-time and travel-time analysis.
- Demographics and profiling: age, gender and purchasing power.
- Behaviour: visit frequency, dwell time, time of day and dayparts, cross-visitation between up to 10 location pairs, and international visitation for tourism.
- Footfall density and transportation mode.
- Places, brands and industries: points of interest, brand locations and brand analysis, industry performance, shopping centre and retail centre types.
- Geo-spend: spend by volume and category at any UK location, via Experian.
- Tools: the Explore map (draw any area or use layers for travel time, catchment, shopping centres, retail centres, brand locations, industries and postcodes), White Space Analysis, and Projects for monitoring many locations and reporting to stakeholders.
- Delivery: the platform, CSV or Excel exports, monthly PDF location reports, and data feeds as Parquet and CSV files into Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage buckets.
- Cadence: data refreshes weekly.
Frequently asked questions
How do you choose a location for a restaurant?
Start with footfall at the times you trade, then check who those people are, how long they stay and how far they travel. Look at nearby food and drink brands and compare the site with your best branches. Huq provides all of this for any UK address.
Why do dayparts matter in restaurant site selection?
A site's busy hours may not match yours. Breakfast cafés need morning commuters, while dinner-led restaurants need evening and weekend trade. Huq breaks footfall down by time of day and day of week, so you can see whether a site is busy when you would be open.
Can Huq separate location problems from operational ones?
Yes, when you combine it with your own sales. Comparing footfall around each restaurant with its sales shows whether a weak branch has a location issue or an operational one. PizzaExpress combined Huq's monthly footfall with sales across 370+ UK stores to do exactly this.
How often is the data updated?
Huq data refreshes weekly. Each location also gets a monthly PDF report with footfall, dayparts, dwell time, catchment and trends against regional and national benchmarks. You can follow footfall at a new site from the week it opens.
Does Huq cover all UK locations?
Huq covers any address in the UK, including high streets, retail parks, shopping centres, stations and leisure destinations, with no sensors needed. Accuracy is published per country, and in Great Britain it is an 18.7% median error against landlord-reported footfall.
What do I get in the free analysis?
Use the form to share some of your restaurants or the units you're considering. Huq will run a free analysis of footfall and catchment for those sites, so you can check the data against branches you already know.
Questions? Talk to us
Book a demoAbout Huq
Huq is a location intelligence company. We turn anonymised mobile location data into footfall, catchment and visitor insight for any place, so retailers, property owners and local authorities can make decisions on evidence.
See how your locations really perform
Up to 5 locations. No cost, no commitment.