
Origins
Our
parent company, Research Report for Foodservice, was
founded in 1996. We started by publishing a weekly
list of new restaurant openings in San Diego, California
and New York City. To distinguish our reports from
competitive products, we dug much deeper to uncover
new openings and we verified sales lead information
by personally calling each establishment to confirm
the accuracy of all our data. Over time, this painstaking
approach made quite an impression on the foodservice
industry. We now cover the entire continental United
States and we’ve become the country’s
largest provider of weekly restaurant and foodservice
sales lead reports, bypassing our competitors by a
considerable margin. Currently more than 10,000 marketing
managers, salespeople and other foodservice executives
rely on our weekly bulletins. What began as an empty
database in 1996 now houses timely, accurate information
on more than 200,000 restaurants.
How
and why the RestaurantChains.net database began-
Building
on the success, experience and research process we
developed for our weekly reporting, we soon realized
that the foodservice industry had an urgent need for
better sales leads. While many firms publish annual
directories, these books are filled with stale, incomplete
and inaccurate data. For example, having observed
that turnover among restaurant executives averages
between 3.5 and 4.2% each month, we couldn’t
imagine the value of an annual directory that started
going out of date the minute it was printed.
To
fill the need for a database containing broader, more
accurate and more timely information, we launched
RestaurantChains.net in 2004. We started by mining
our proprietary listings, concentrating on multi-unit
operators (since many foodservice companies had expressed
a desire to sell directly to headquarters personnel
and not to franchisees). At launch, RestaurantChains.net
contained information on 3,000 unique flagship companies.
That number has now grown to 4000 and approximately
five to ten new concepts are added every week.
Our
mission and philosophy
Thanks
to our well-honed research process, our frequent re-verifying
of all data, and the real-time posting of new information,
RestaurantChains.net is setting new standards for
accuracy and timeliness. Our business approach is
based on the following standards and principles: