About
“We built this because operators deserve the same intelligence edge that institutional investors have.”
Why We Built This
When you open a restaurant, you get a lot of advice. Keep your food cost under 30%. Target 30% labor. Aim for 20% EBITDA. These are rules of thumb — not intelligence. They don’t tell you whether you’re competitive in your specific market, at your specific price point, with your specific format.
Hedge funds have Bloomberg terminals. Private equity firms have proprietary databases. Retail chains have sophisticated competitive intelligence teams. Restaurant operators have a spreadsheet and a hunch.
That gap has always existed. For years, the data simply wasn’t available — operators kept their numbers private, industry surveys were self-reported and unreliable, and nobody had built the infrastructure to aggregate and anonymize actual operating data at scale.
But the POS revolution changed that. When operators moved from cash registers to modern platforms like Toast and Square, they began generating structured, machine-readable data. Labor platforms like 7shifts and Gusto did the same for scheduling and payroll. Resy and OpenTable captured reservation behavior. Suddenly, for the first time, the data existed — it just wasn’t being used to help operators understand their competitive position.
The Restaurant Index was built to close that gap. We pull real operating data — not surveys, not estimates — from the platforms operators already use. We anonymize it, benchmark it, and return it to operators in a form they can actually act on.
The result is something that has never existed before: a competitive intelligence platform that gives independent restaurant operators the same quality of market insight that was previously available only to the largest chains and the firms that acquire them.
What We Stand For
No Noise
The restaurant industry is full of dashboards that show you data without helping you understand it. We are not in that business. Every metric we surface comes with context, benchmarks, and a clear explanation of what it means for your operation.
Real Data
We do not use self-reported surveys. We do not aggregate data from operators who cherry-pick what they share. Every number in The Restaurant Index comes from actual operating systems — POS, payroll, reservations — verified and ingested directly.
Operator First
We exist to serve the operator, not to sell their data, not to broker relationships, not to build a media business around their information. The product is the only product. Operator trust is the only currency that matters.
Who We Are
Ryan Jaeger has spent two decades running restaurants — from small independent concepts to multi-unit operations across multiple markets.
Throughout that career, one problem consistently frustrated him: the complete absence of competitive intelligence available to independent operators. Chains knew their numbers relative to the market. Institutional investors had access to proprietary data. Independent operators had nothing but instinct and generic industry benchmarks that bore little resemblance to their actual competitive environment.
The Restaurant Index is his answer to that problem — built from the perspective of someone who spent years wishing it existed.
Built for operators.
By an operator.
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