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Financial Intelligence - Benchmark Update September 18, 2024
Financial Intelligence - Benchmark Update September 18, 2024
Tom Wilhelm avatar
Written by Tom Wilhelm
Updated over 2 months ago

Financial Intelligence Benchmark Update

As part of our ongoing commitment at Black Box Intelligence to provide you with the most accurate and comprehensive benchmarks for the chain restaurant industry, we refresh our Financial Intelligence historical benchmarks once a quarter. This process incorporates new companies into our published benchmarks, removes data from companies no longer reporting, and reevaluates our segment definitions to better reflect industry and brand evolution.

This week, with the release corresponding to week ending September 15, the benchmarks published through your dashboards and the downloadable Excel file will reflect the results of this quarter’s benchmark refresh.


These are the changes included as part of this benchmark refresh:

  1. 12 new restaurant brands have been added to the benchmarks

  2. 11 brands have been removed

  3. We've refined our methodology to include a selected sample of locations for very large companies, giving a more accurate reflection of what's happening in the market.

The changes have had minimal impact on our overall industry benchmarks and industry segments. For example, year to date, the average change in the weekly comp sales metric after the refresh has been very small, showing only minor adjustments. Here's a look at the average shift:

  • Industry comp sales changed by 0.05%

  • The comp sales benchmark for Quick Service, Family Dining and Fine Dining all changed by less than +/- 0.1%

  • The benchmarks for Casual Dining and Upscale Casual changed by less than +/- 0.2%

  • The comp sales benchmark for Fast Casual remains unchanged

The impact of these changes on DMA-level benchmarks is as follows, based on comp sales benchmarks currently available:

  • Casual Dining benchmarks increased by 4 DMAs

  • Fine Dining benchmarks increased by 1 DMA

  • Upscale Casual benchmarks decreased by 8 DMAs


As always, you will be able to download the updated list of companies included in the benchmark (along with their segment and cuisine type classification) from within your dashboards. This list is also included in the last sheet of the downloadable Excel file which includes all the data and is made available each week.

At Black Box Intelligence we strive to continue to improve the value of our data and insights and through those efforts, become better partners for our restaurant customers. Part of that effort is keeping you informed of any meaningful changes as we expand our dataset. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to your Customer Success partner at Black Box or to [email protected] if you have any questions.

Thank you,

The Black Box Intelligence Team

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