Counting Restaurant Openings

Restaurants are a big business in North America — and Calcbench can help you understand just how big, by tracking the total number of restaurants that publicly traded food businesses are opening or closing from one quarter to the next.

Publicly traded restaurant companies do report their total number of restaurants each quarter in their earnings releases. This means Calcbench can collect and crunch those numbers with just a few keystrokes, which is what we did one afternoon after rolling ourselves back to the office from a calorie-laden lunch.

Figure 1, below, charts total restaurant locations for two dozen restaurant businesses for the last eight quarters, grouped into fast-food (blue line) and sit-down (red line) categories. 

For those who can’t squint enough to see the numbers on the vertical axes, here is the same information displayed in a table. (As you can see, we are still waiting for enough Q1 data from the sit-down restaurants to add that component to the chart and table.)

Our sample includes numerous big names in fast food, such as McDonalds ($MCD) and Jack in the Box ($JACK); as well as sit-down restaurants like Cava ($CAVA) and Darden Restaurants ($DRI), which operates the Olive Garden, Capital Grille, and others. 

What’s the use in knowing this? Lots. For starters, you can drill deeper into individual data of restaurant companies to see how many stores they’re opening or closing. Larger restaurant businesses will even report the number of stores by specific brand. See Figure 2, below, showing recent changes for 10 brands operated by Darden.

	Q1-25	Q4-24
Olive Garden	927	925
LongHorn Steakhouse	586	580
Cheddar's Scratch Kitchen	182	181
Chuy's	106	104
Yard House	89	88
Ruth's Chris Steak House	82	82
The Capital Grille	71	70
Seasons 52	45	45
Bahama Breeze	43	43
Eddie V's	30	30
The Capital Burger	4	4
TOTAL	2,165	2,152

Knowing the total number of restaurants can also sharpen your balance sheet analysis, since many restaurants will be leased space, appearing on the balance sheet as a right-of-use asset. Restaurants owned by the business will appear under the Property, Plant & Equipment line.

Calcbench users can find this information yourselves quite easily. Just find the restaurant company you want to research, pull up its earnings release, and look for the data point on stores in operation (or stores opened and closed, which some firms also report). Then you can use our Earnings Model feature or our See Tag History feature to chart that data point through previous filings.

You can also chart store data for multiple companies at once. For example, you can use our Bulk Data Query page to dig up store closures for large groups; just scroll down to the “Footnote Points” section, where you’ll see a section that tracks data specific to retail businesses. Expand that and you’ll see the option to track number of stores. 

If any readers out there have suggestions for other industry-specific research we should do, drop us a line at us@calcbench.com any time. We’re always happy to help a client dig into the data!