Source: Restaurantdata.com – Restaurant market intelligence, ownership research, executive contacts, and expansion analysis.
New research suggests organizational complexity develops well before restaurant companies reach enterprise scale.
A new industry analysis is challenging one of the restaurant industry’s common assumptions: multi-concept operators are not primarily large national restaurant companies.
According to newly released research, nearly two-thirds of multi-concept restaurant organizations in the United States operate fewer than 20 restaurant locations, despite managing multiple brands, concepts, operating structures, or franchise relationships.
The study examined 1,339 multi-concept restaurant companies representing 288,239 restaurant units and approximately $454.5 billion in system sales. While the database includes many of the industry’s largest enterprise organizations, researchers found that 63.5% of companies remain relatively small, demonstrating that organizational complexity often develops years before companies become large regional or national chains.
The report also found that the median multi-concept operator manages three concepts, 13 restaurant units, and operates in two states. More than half of the companies analyzed conduct business across multiple states, while nearly 77% have at least one identified executive or management contact with an email address.
Geographically, the Southeast contains the broadest concentration of multi-concept operators, with Florida, California, and Texas ranking as the three most common operating states.
One of the report’s more notable findings is that concept count and company size are often unrelated. Some hospitality groups create unique restaurant concepts for individual locations while operating relatively small restaurant portfolios. At the opposite end of the spectrum, some of the industry’s largest organizations manage thousands of restaurants under only a handful of brands.
Researchers also observed that organizational depth expands alongside geographic reach.
The complete research report is available at:
