Datadory notebook
How Competitive Intel Product Teams Use Restaurants Data
1,744 datasets. Pick your catch. Every guide here is built on what the catalog can actually prove.
1,744 datasets. Pick your catch.
How do you monitor restaurant competitors with data?
The workflow reality for a competitive intel product team covering restaurants is that no regulator prints rival revenue and no exchange filing discloses unit economics. Chains volunteer store counts on investor decks, trade press picks up a closure long after the venue's own listing already showed it closed, and the evidence you can actually automate lives in two public traces: the place layer, where every venue is a row with timestamps, and the inspection layer, where governments publish hygiene outcomes venue by venue.
Which datasets catch a rival opening or closing first?
Openings and closings are the highest-value signals in foodservice, and two sources catch them on different clocks.
What can inspection records reveal about a competitor?
Hygiene records move on a third clock and cut harder than reviews: nothing repositions a venue like a failed inspection, and regulators publish it whether the brand likes it or not.
UK Food Hygiene Rating Scheme (FHRS) Open Data applies the same discipline to the United Kingdom. A keyless JSON/XML API needs no registration, roughly 380 local authority feeds refresh daily across England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland, and each record carries the 0-5 rating, inspection date, geocoded address and business type; Camden alone publishes 4,260 records in about 4 MB of XML. Because RatingDate history rides along per business, you can timestamp when a monitored rival's rating moved - and setting NYC letter grades beside FHRS 0-5 ratings is the standard way to benchmark hygiene regimes across borders.
What does a five-step restaurant competitor-monitoring loop look like?
Run in build order, fastest payoff first:
Pick up where this leaves off
Every one of these ships with sample rows before you commit to anything.
Foursquare Places API
Overture Maps Places
NYC DOHMH Restaurant Inspection Results
UK Food Hygiene Rating Scheme (FHRS) Open Data
Yelp structured datasets
Hugging Face Datasets - Restaurant Search
Want rows instead of a pitch? Name the datasets.
API, files, or your warehouse. Daily, weekly, or hourly.
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How fast can you detect a restaurant chain adding or dropping locations?
On two clocks. Foursquare writes date_created and date_closed onto venue records in real time, so a closure surfaces within days. Overture Maps Places ships monthly snapshots of about 9.98 million Food and Drink features, so brand-level footprint shifts appear at whichever release you diff next.