The data firm Technomic this week announced a new partnership with the location platform GroundTruth that promises to increase details, and speed, on sales performance and traffic patterns at the nation’s biggest restaurants, convenience stores and grocers.
Technomic will add GroundTruth’s Blueprints technology to its traffic and market share program Transaction Insights.
Transaction Insights features ongoing purchase data for more than 3 million consumers representing more than 18 million foodservice visits per month. Technomic is a sister company of Restaurant Business.
GroundTruth has a database of 3 million mapped business locations and 75 million mobile devices.
Combining the two sets of data will give users the ability to measure same-store sales and traffic performance down to the location, daypart or even by consumer group.
“It will strengthen Transaction Insights and make sales and traffic numbers more closely aligned to same-store sales and traffic,” said Sara Monnette, vice president of innovation with Technomic. “It will provide greater granularity looking at dayparts, week parts and consumers.”
The partnership will look at data for the 500 largest restaurant chains, as measured by Technomic’s Top 500 Chain Restaurant Report, as well as the 40 largest convenience stores and the 25 largest grocers.
“Location is the biggest untapped opportunity for digital marketers wanting to drive business growth,” Eric Hadley, chief marketing officer for GroundTruth, said in a statement. “Consumers may aspire online, but they live offline. No one travels to a restaurant without genuine intent.”
The partnership will show what restaurant chains could be winning the breakfast market share battle in Dallas, for instance. Users could also find out what kind of impact a new menu item or media campaign has on its foot traffic.
The partnership will enable users to see how much a snowstorm can be expected to hurt their sales and traffic or whether a food safety incident will keep customers away.
The data partnership will also make information available within a week in some cases, Monnette said, meaning that users will be able to determine the impact of an individual event relatively quickly.
And it will help Transaction Insights determine same-store sales performance for individual chains by month.
“Our customers are asking for better behavioral information to make informed business decisions,” Shawn Edwards, president of Technomic, said in a statement. He said the partnership is part of an “ongoing quest to provide a holistic, transparent view of the foodservice industry through bigger and better data sets.”
Monnette said that the combined data will be built into Transaction Insights’ dashboard by the end of the year. It will be available on an “ad hoc basis” before then, however. “It will be an enhancement to it,” she said.
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