Owning and operating a restaurant is a dream job for many aspiring entrepreneurs. But there is one thing for you to understand; starting a restaurant means entering a highly competitive market. According to Entrepreneur Magazine, the number of food-service operations has skyrocketed from 155,000 about 40 years ago to nearly 960,000 today.
However, the restaurant market has still got a spot for your business. People nowadays, don’t want to deal with the hassle of cooking. What they want is simple, being able to eat delicious food without any cooking effort and dishes. Depending on your choice of cuisine, consumers’ preferences and most importantly, depending on the location for your new restaurant, you can be the new favorite of the crowds!
In this blog post, we will examine the most suitable locations to open a restaurant in Los Angeles. First, we will take a look at the population of the census block groups (CBG). Then we will evaluate each CBGs competitor density by evaluating the number of citizens with respect to the locations of other restaurants in the vicinity. Without further ado, let’s begin!
In our first chart you can see the population values of each CBG. When we first look at the map, we see that the aggregate population is accumulated around the line from the center to the bottom of the heat map. Moreover, the north side of the center point could be classified as less crowded.
At this point, you need to think about the target audience of your dream restaurant. That is, you need to identify your customer portfolio by asking several questions to yourself. For instance, what will be the demographics of the people you serve? Will your business be a top-notch restaurant or a fast food restaurant? After having a grasp on what kind of restaurant that you’d like to open, you can look for candidate locations for your dream business with the help of our in-depth and customized geolocation analyses. Feel free to reach out to us!
In this article, though, we will go through a general restaurant definition as much as possible in order to give all our readers an idea about how the analysis is conducted.
After examining the regions on the map according to their population, let's look at the locations of other restaurants in the vicinity. As you can also see, there are restaurants in almost every corner except Beverly Hills area. Due to its demographics and exorbitant prices, it's not surprising that there aren't many restaurants in the Beverly Hills area. Apart from that area, it can be argued that there are many restaurants all around the area. However, just by looking at the pinpoints of competitor restaurants, we can’t compare CBGs with each other.
To understand the distribution of restaurants on the map, we compare each CBG's population by the number of restaurants around it. Based on our calculation metrics, we see that the greener the CBG get, the higher the ratio of population to number of restaurants in the vicinity. Therefore, we might conclude that dark green areas are relatively less packed with restaurants. Even though population values itself wouldn’t be accurate enough to find the best location, we could proceed with it for demonstration purposes.
When we examine the density map, 3 different regions draw our attention. The first one of these is around Beverly Hills. However, we exclude this overpriced region from our analysis. The remaining 2 regions are as follows: The first one is located on the line extending from the city center to the south, and the other region is located in the north of the map. The latter one is further away from the city center. Then, we can imply that it is possible to find the optimal location between the CBGs in these two areas according to your preferences!
In this blog post we tried to identify best locations to open a restaurant in Los Angeles. Throughout our analysis, we used census block groups’ (CBG) location data and population values.
A hard reality is that many restaurants fail during their first year due to a lack of planning and wrong location choices. The former is a condition that must be met after your new restaurant opens its doors to customers. However, choosing the right location is an important step you should take before starting your operations.
If you want to analyze the area of your choice and find the best location within the area, feel free to contact us!