GIS data for fast food industry

Question

I am working a small project related to fast food industry. I am trying find GIS data for fast food chains like subway, MC Donald's, Arby's, etc in state of Ohio. Basically, I am looking for point location of each facility (for each fast food chain). I know that I could digitize them but that would be painful. Is there a faster way of getting this information? Excel files with the address details will also help.

Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

Ian Spiro at http://www.fastfoodmaps.com/ scraped these data nationally in 2007. His site has a great interactive map; maybe you can get the data too (or scrape them!).

Answer 2

KFC have a store locator. Behind this is a FindNearBy web service that can be sent lat longs.

http://www.kfc.com/storelocator/services/MWS.asmx?op=FindNearby

You can issue SOAP requests to this and get a nice list of stores in JSON. Alternatively just manually run a query for Ohio and copy the JSON reponse in FireBug.

{
    "Latitude": 40.393947,
    "Longitude": -82.488953,
    "Distance": 11.704096790435619,
    "Address": "301 West High Street",
    "City": "Mount Vernon",
    "StateProvince": "OH",
    "PostalCode": "43050",
    "Country": "US",
    "cssProperties": [
        {
            "Name": "BusinessPhone",
            "Value": "(740)392-4900"
        },
        {
            "Name": "Buffet",
            "Value": false
        },
        {
            "Name": "LateNightHours",
            "Value": false
        }
    ]
},

The same approach can probably be taken with other chains, although the McDonalds Restaurant Locator seems to return a huge wadge of HTML rather than a nice data format.

Answer 3

There are a number of paid-for datasets that you may need to consider. Often State Govt has listings of their businesses, as well as vendor's like InfoUSA or Dun & Bradstreet. I posted a similar question a while back with limited response.

Update: A quick Google search came up with Ohio Business Gateway as a likely candidate. Have you tried contacting them for an address list? http://business.ohio.gov/

This article talks about likely options for all states in the US. "All 50 states make some level of corporate and business filings available online. In a few instances only limited information (such as name availability) is retrievable. The majority of the states, however, use their Web presence to disseminate a range of public business records -- and most of them offer access at no charge."

They suggest the checking with the Secretary of State for Ohio.

Answer 4

Another potential data source could be OpenStreetMap. Look for features with amenity="fast_food" :)

Answer 5

August 1, 2011 blog posting:

"SimpleGeo’s CC0 Places data set is now available for download at no cost. If you’d like to get your hands on 21M+ POIs that cover 63 countries, we’re ready to hand that over to you in one file. The file is about 2GB in .ZIP format, and remember, with the CC0 license, this data becomes yours – free and clear – to do whatever you want. We hope you do awesome things with it!" http://blog.simplegeo.com/2011/08/01/august-updates/

Answer 6

POI Factory could give you some very good sources of data. You can download the data in CSV format with X,Y, and possibly some additional meta fields like address, city, state, zip, and phone. Being a crowd-sourced dataset, you have to take it with a grain of salt, but it also could theoretically be updated and verified by individuals more often than commercial data sources. It might take a little work to put them all into a single data layer, but I wouldn't imagine it would be terribly difficult.

Uncategorized POI Files- http://www.poi-factory.com/node/5942 (where they have McDonald's, KFC, Subway data layers).

Note on Terms of Use: It does state that "The content and services on web site are provided for your personal, non-commercial use only. You may not use content or services from this web site to sell a product or service."
http://www.poi-factory.com/terms

This site was referenced in the previous question: Does a national(USA) interstate rest stop/rest area dataset exist?

Answer 7

I've mentioned here previously that ESRI business analyst is a source for this. If you are in a university, perhaps they could get access to it.

Alternatively, InfoUSA is a possible source, either through a university license, or by paying directly per point (~20c per data point).