Fast Food in Reading - A National Benchmark?

The 2020s have seen a continued growth of QSR (Quick Service Restaurant) chains in the UK, with new international brands showing up on Britain's high streets at least once a year. Using the Geolytix Retail Universe, I take a look at which areas are changing the fastest, and where future growth might take root.

I was walking along the high street of my new home of Reading the other day, and noticed that it's received one of the UK's very first Zambreros: an Australian Tex Mex chain that entered the UK in 2021, and has the ambition to open 100 restaurants here by 2030. It reminded me of a retail urban legend I was told, that Reading is the number one preferred spot for international QSR brands to try out the British market, before committing to rolling out across the higher rent inside, and higher risk units outside of central London, Manchester and Birmingham.

It got me thinking, is there any truth to this? It certainly seems like there's a lot of different fast food chains along my walk to the train station, and demographically the town feels pretty representative of the UK as a whole. But let's check the data, and see if it holds up to scrutiny.

I'm using the Geolytix Retail Places and Retail Universe datasets for this analysis, which will help me get a complete picture of the whole country’s retail ecosystem. I'm mostly looking at In Line restaurants, within a 500m radius of the city, town and urban centres.

If we want to look at a raw figure of how many branded QSR retailers there are in UK centres, the obvious places stand out - of the dozen with 22 or more, nearly half are in Central London and mostly overlap, and the rest are in regional capitals. Reading is only a little further down the list, with an impressive 21 for its size - more than Newcastle, or London's West End! So it seems at first glance that our theory isn't completely unfounded. Let's dig a little deeper, and see what else we find.

Despite its smaller size, Reading town centre’s retail density approaches that of regional hubs

Looking now at the count of unique chains - ignoring duplicate units - we get the answer we're looking for: Reading jumps up to joint 7th in the UK, with only four of its branded QSR units being duplicates. It's not the only smaller centre punching above its weight though: Other of London's commuter towns like Bromley, Kingston, Guildford and Croydon are up there, as well as North Laine in Brighton - giving a very rough blueprint for future fast food growth in the UK.

Reading is well represented across most cuisines, creating a robust mix for consumers.

Looking at the brand breakdown, it's clearly thanks to the newer brands - Popeyes and Wendys have since spread further afield, but the likes of Zambrero, Jollibee and Marugame Udon remain sub-20. Other very recent UK entries include Chick-fil-A, Carl's Jr, and Dave's Hot Chicken - I imagine we will be seeing these in Reading sooner rather than later!

Zambrero & Jollibee are just two of the newest brands to be added to the Retail Universe dataset

So the urban legend is seemingly true, even with this very simple look at the UK we can see that Reading and other towns like it are over-represented in fast food chains, especially the newer brands that have entered the UK in the last 5 years. But investigating this opens up lots of other potential questions for future analysis into the British market:

• Are high streets the best place for new QSR, or are large shopping centres like Cabot Circus in Bristol more profitable?
• Which international brands are best suited to enter the UK next, in the second half of the 2020s?
• Why are there 4 McDonalds in Leeds city centre, and 5 Subways in Doncaster!?

These are the kinds of questions that the GEOLYTIX team of data analysts, data scientists and location planning specialists answer on a daily basis, in the UK and around the world.

Schedule your demo with our online location intelligence platform Geolytix MAPP, and try out the datasets used here for yourself!

Josh Reynolds, Data Scientist

All photos taken by author