How do we determine the legal entity behind a restaurant?

[waldoj]

I'm pretty sure that the answer to this is "we can't with the data we've been provided with," but I just want to raise this question.

If there was a mechanism to figure out who owns a restaurant—not the human, necessarily, but the corporate entity—then it would be possible to connect restaurant data to all kinds of other data, via state corporation records.

[waldoj]

Here's an old snapshot of raw data from the health department, exported straight from their database, and there's nothing obvious.

I'd love to figure out some way to provide y'all with corporate identifiers for every one of these restaurants.

[ttavenner]

It's an interesting question. I think with the data available from the VDH and the SCC there isn't much we could do. No real standards are enforced with regards to vendor naming in the VDH database. We might be able to match single location entities by address/name parsing. But I suspect in the majority of cases this wouldn't work. What you tend to find in Norfolk and likely many other places are restaurant groups that own several establishments. Often the name of the company is quite diffrent and innocuous. What we would need is some intermediate data set that listed all the locations for a given company. I'm not sure if that data set exists.

[fj]

In most Virginia municipalities, local businesses need an operating permit for tax purposes. The operating permit has to match the business and the address for which the permit is issued, so it effectively serves as a foreign key between the restaurant (as in, the physical address at which food is served) and the business entity that operates it.

So, one way to do it might be to get a FOIA request going for business permits for anything that's a restaurant.

[waldoj]

Hmm. Interesting. Coincidentally, yesterday I heard from a municipal tax office, looking to get a list of all businesses registered with the SCC as being located in her municipality, to compare against their BPOL and permit records, to see who isn't paying them. I'd been thinking only in terms of providing them with that list and letting them sort it out, but perhaps there's something to be said for supporting data flowing the other way.

So imagine that they upload their (public) operating permit data in a standardized format—presumably whatever format that their database supports—and it gives them a list of every establishment that the state has a record of that they don't have a record of, in exchange for this service being allowed to keep and use that permit data. I say that without the foggiest idea of whether any personally-identifying information or confidential information exists in that data, or whether there's even a standard format common among municipalities. In the abstract, though, it could work nicely.

This is way off topic for this repository, I know, but it's a good venue for working through the problem of connecting individual restaurants with their corporate identifiers. :)

[waldoj]

This is interesting: Virginia retail franchising records. Try a search for "Subway."

It might be interesting to know that a restaurant is a franchise, to establish that it's related to other restaurants of the same name.

[ttavenner]

I wonder if there is any way to get this data other than doing a FOIA? The SCC is good (bad?) about using aspx forms with post requests so collecting data is quite difficult.

If we had this data it would be a simple thing to string match the franchise name against the OHI database and product a decent list of franchises with owner information.

[waldoj]

I contacted them today about getting another dataset that they don't provide bulk data for (trademark and service mark registrations)—I'll regard that as a test case for getting franchise information.