For companies selling to restaurantsYour next account applied for its licence last month.
A restaurant picks its point of sale, its distributor and its insurer roughly once, in the weeks before it opens. 2ndSight watches the City of Chicago’s licence record and tells you which restaurants entered it in your territory, filtered so the list is restaurants and not pharmacies.
What it does for a territory
- Gives you the moment, not the census. Yelp and a bought list enumerate restaurants that already exist, which is the population that has already chosen a vendor. A licence appearing is an event, and it happens before the doors do.
- Tells you which ones are worth the week. The record already knows what traded in that room before, how long each lasted, and whether this operator has run restaurants previously. A fourth site and a first attempt are different calls.
- Follows your patch, not ours. Watches are set by neighbourhood, corridor or zip, and the changes arrive as one digest rather than as a dashboard you have to remember to open.
What it will not do
- It will not tell you which accounts are at risk. A licence lapses long after a dining room goes dark. One year on, the public record shows only 17.7% of the closures that have already happened. We could produce a churn list; it would be wrong about named, living businesses most of the time, so we do not sell one and nobody else honestly can either.
- It is not a contact database. We hold a business name and an address, not a decision maker, a phone number or an email. If you already pay for contact data, keep paying for it. What you cannot buy anywhere is the trigger and the history behind it.
- It does not predict who will succeed. The read ranks a concept against the record at zip resolution. It is not a credit model, and it must not be used to decline anyone a lease, a loan or an account.
What it costs
The record and the reports are free, so a rep can check a live prospect before anything is decided. The monitor, which is the watchlists, the change digest and the saved territories, is a flat monthly fee. Current pricing is on use2ndsight.com/pricing.
2ndSight, a product of 2nd Gen Kitchens · Chicago · use2ndsight.com
Why the raw licence feed is not the answer
The city publishes its food licences and anyone can download them. Three things happen between that file and a list a salesperson can work.
Most of it is not a restaurant
Chicago’s “Retail Food Establishment” licence covers groceries, corner shops, pharmacies, hotels and school cafeterias. 37% of the 40,741 records in it are not somewhere you can eat a meal that was cooked for you. We know exactly how that fails, because it caught us: our own movers dashboard once listed Walgreens, CVS and Blockbuster among Chicago’s fastest-scaling operators. One definition of “restaurant” now sits at the source and everything downstream inherits it.
A name and an address is not a qualified lead
The licence tells you a restaurant exists. The record tells you what was in that room before, how long each one lasted, and how many places this operator has opened. That is the difference between a call that opens with “congratulations on the new spot” and one that opens with the fact that the last two tenants there lasted under two years each.
Nobody can tell you who closed last year
We measured the lag. One year on, the public record shows only 17.7% of the closures that have already happened, and it takes three years to see them all. Any count of “restaurants that closed last year”, ours or a trade paper’s or a national data vendor’s, is short by roughly five times. We publish openings monthly and closures only at the lag the data supports. That is also why there is no churn product on this page: we would rather lose the feature than publish a list that is wrong about a business that is still trading.
Every figure here is generated from the City of Chicago’s licence record and moves with the monthly index refresh. Method: use2ndsight.com/methodology · The monthly index: use2ndsight.com/chicago/openings