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.


10 Answers 10


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!). Another place where you can find pubs and restaurants, at this time, is TheWebMiner Geo


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


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

A similar approach can probably be taken with other chains. For example, the McDonalds Restaurant Locator performs an AJAX request based on the coordinates of the map, and returns the matching restaurants in a JSON payload. You can send a request with your given coordinates, eg:


"address":"<h3>329 WASHINGTON ST<\/h3>, BOSTON MA 02108 (617)557-0089 "

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


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/


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


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."

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


Available US State or National business (or employer) database lists? mentions 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).


I recommend either using the Factual APIs:


Or contacting them and asking them for a download. For a preview of the data, see here.


You can use google places APIs , the volume of requests for the free version have a limit.

The following example is a search request for places of type 'restaurant' within a 500m radius of a point in Sydney, Australia


Some parts have been deprecated , read the documentation to find what is usefull that you can intergrate with your application.



Check out Red Lion Data a commercial supplier of accurate and up to date location data for the retail and restaurant markets.

They have a Fast food category here: http://www.redliondata.com/datasets-tag/fast-food/


Kaggle now also hosts a dataset, can be found here.

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