About

About FoodBud

What it is

FoodBud is a foodservice-chain intelligence platform. We track how big restaurant and beverage operators actually are — on the right measure — and make clear what each number does and doesn’t mean. The edge isn’t more data; it’s disciplined data: every figure is labeled by what it measures, traced to a source, and never compared across incompatible bases.

Why “caliber” is the whole point

“How big is this chain?” has no single answer. A franchised system’s system-wide sales, a company-operated chain’s revenue, and a conglomerate’s restaurant-segment proxy are three different things — comparing them naively is apples-to-oranges. So FoodBud labels every number with its scale basis, marks estimates as estimates, tiers every source (S1 primary filings down to S3), and fences off figures that mustn’t be compared — market cap is a market valuation, not a measure of how much a company sells, so we show it but never rank by it. We never invent a number. How we do all this is spelled out in the Methodology.

What we cover

  • Operators — 200+ foodservice operators, ranked on operational scale (system sales / GMV, company-operated revenue, or a clearly-labeled proxy), each with a data card: scale, unit economics, cost structure, brand breakdowns, and per-figure sources.
  • Rankings — a basis-aware leaderboard you can filter and compare like-for-like.
  • Insights — operator deep-dives (e.g., why McDonald’s 45,356 restaurants are a franchise footprint, not a revenue figure; how Yum!’s global sales already include the separately-listed Yum China).
  • Archive — curated historical foodservice-industry coverage.
  • Data quality — a public dashboard of our source-tier mix, estimate rates, and guardrails.

Who it’s for

Investors, analysts, operators, researchers, and journalists who need accurate, comparable, source-backed scale intelligence on foodservice chains — and who care that a number means what it says.

What it’s not

Not investment advice. Not market-cap rankings. Not cross-basis comparisons. Information only.