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Restaurant site selection analysis
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United States
Restaurant and franchise site selection with foot traffic
Compare candidate restaurant sites on foot traffic by day and week part, catchment and competitor visits. Start with a free daypart comparison.
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Up to 5 locations. No cost, no commitment.
We handle your details in line with the CCPA and applicable US state privacy laws.
Restaurant site selection depends on more than how busy a street is. A lunch concept needs weekday midday traffic; a dinner spot needs evenings and weekends. Huq measures visits to any US address by day and week part, shows where visitors come from and how they arrive, and maps nearby restaurant brands. More than 1,000 locations are manually validated in each of Huq's 35 markets twice a year. Start with a free daypart comparison.
See how restaurant site selection works in Huq
This overview tours the Huq platform. For restaurant site selection, watch the time of day and dwell time views, and how the Explore map's brand location and industry layers show the restaurants already trading nearby. Then see how Projects track each candidate site and how results export for a franchise approval pack.
- Time of day and dwell time: whether a site's busy hours and visit lengths match your trading pattern.
- Transportation mode: how visitors arrive, useful when parking or a drive-thru matters.
- Brands and industries: which restaurant brands cluster nearby, so you can judge competition.
Trusted by 300+ organisations · Data across 35 markets
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What is restaurant site selection?
Restaurant site selection is the process of choosing locations for restaurants, from a single site to multi-unit QSR and fast casual expansion. The core question is whether enough of the right people visit the area at the times your concept trades.
That's why timing matters as much as volume. A site busy with weekday office workers may suit a breakfast and lunch concept but struggle in the evening. Teams also look at the trade area, competitor clusters, access, parking, drive-thru potential and occupancy cost.
In franchise site selection, the franchisor sets territory rules and site criteria, and the franchisee finds and validates sites against them. Both need evidence the other side can check. Huq provides visits by day and week part, dwell time, catchment and drive time, transportation mode and nearby restaurant brands for any address.
What's in your restaurant site selection analysis
01
Day and week part patterns
Foot traffic by time of day and day of week, so you can match a site's busy periods to your trading hours.
02
Catchment and visitor origin
Where each candidate site's visitors come from, to check it reaches the customers your concept serves.
03
Nearby restaurant brands
Brand locations, industry performance and competitor visits nearby, so you can tell a healthy cluster from a saturated one.
04
Overlap between your units
Cross-visitation across up to 10 location pairs, showing how much a new unit would share customers with existing ones.
What a restaurant site selection analysis shows
The free daypart comparison covers two or three candidate sites. Here's what you'll see.
01
Foot traffic by daypart across candidate sites
Morning, lunch, evening and late-night traffic for each site side by side. Two sites with similar weekly totals can trade very differently by time of day.
02
Weekday vs weekend pattern
How each site's traffic splits across the week. Office-led locations dip at weekends, while leisure and residential areas often peak on Saturday and Sunday.
03
Competitor visits and catchment
Weekly visits to nearby competitors alongside where each site's visitors come from. A strong competitor drawing from the same area is worth checking before you sign.
Restaurant site selection data across the US
Huq covers any address in the United States: shopping centers, main streets, downtowns, strip malls, 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 restaurant and franchise teams use Huq for site selection
- Huq publishes its accuracy by country: a 19.5% median error across published markets, against a 30% healthy threshold.
- Huq's customers give it an NPS of 42.
- Trusted by 300+ organizations 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 national brands: choose locations, track store performance and benchmark against competitors.
02
Retail real estate owners
Show shopping center 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
- Foot traffic: by week, month and year, with totals, average daily foot traffic, trends, period-over-period change, and visiting vs passing traffic.
- Residents and visitors.
- Trade area and travel time: trade areas by ZIP code, plus drive-time and travel-time analysis.
- Demographics and profiling: age, gender and purchasing power, available in selected markets.
- Behavior: visit frequency, dwell time, time of day and dayparts, cross-visitation between up to 10 location pairs, and international visitation for tourism.
- Foot traffic density and transportation mode.
- Places, brands and industries: points of interest, brand locations and brand analysis, industry performance, shopping center and retail center types.
- Geo-spend: spend by volume and category, available in selected markets.
- Tools: the Explore map (draw any area or use layers for travel time, trade areas, shopping centers, retail centers, brand locations, industries and ZIP codes), 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
What factors matter most in restaurant site selection?
Traffic that matches your dayparts, a trade area that reaches your customers, the right level of competition, access and parking, and an occupancy cost the site can support. Huq covers the first four with visits by time of day, catchment and drive time, nearby restaurant brands and transportation mode.
What is a franchise location?
A franchise location is a unit run by a franchisee under a franchisor's brand and rules. The franchisor usually sets territory rules and site criteria and approves each location; the franchisee finds candidate sites and negotiates the lease. Shared foot traffic and catchment data gives both sides the same evidence to review before a site is approved.
How do you measure restaurant dwell time?
Inside your own restaurant, POS timestamps or table management systems show how long parties stay. To compare locations, including competitors and sites you don't operate, you need external visit data. Huq measures dwell time and visit frequency at any US address, so you can see whether a site draws quick stops or longer visits that suit your format.
What's in the free restaurant site selection analysis?
Send us two or three candidate sites. We'll compare their foot traffic by day and week part, where their visitors come from, and visits to nearby competitors, so you can see which site best fits your trading pattern. There's no commitment.
How often is the foot traffic data updated?
Weekly. Visit data for each site refreshes every week, so you can see how daypart and weekend patterns hold up across seasons rather than judging a site on one visit or one month.
Can Huq analyze restaurant sites anywhere in the US?
Yes. Huq works on any address across the US, including vacant units, second-generation restaurant spaces and competitor restaurants. More than 1,000 locations are manually validated in each of Huq's 35 markets twice a year, and no sensors or cameras are needed, so you can assess a site before you call the landlord.
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.