Restaurant turnover

Florida

Yearly turnover, restaurants (license type 2010) and all food licences. A year is included only when 18 months of follow-up exist after it, because that is how long we watch a licence to decide what its owner change actually was.

Metro areas

Restaurants per metro area, same columns as statewide.

What happened to the licences inspected 2020–2022

Every food licence inspected at least once in 2020–2022 (the cohort stops at the last year that has 18 months of follow-up behind it, because that is how long we watch a licence to classify what happened to it), and what holds it today. Closures were confirmed late: a licence that only recently went quiet is still counted as the same restaurant, not as closed. See the methodology.

Methodology

The licence key

Florida numbers its food licences as a prefix plus digits (``SEA2301175`` — seating restaurant 2301175). The inspection files carry only the digits. Everywhere in this page we join on the numeric tail, leading zeros stripped: the same licence in every feed, and the only key that keeps a purged (closed) licence inside the tables, since the rolling licence feed no longer lists it.

New owner, different restaurant

We take every approved change-of-owner application from DBPR's change-of-owner feed. For each approval we read the name on the licence in the inspections up to 24 months before and within 18 months after. If the later name is a different concept, the licence turned over to a different restaurant. "Same concept" is brand continuity, not string matching: "TACOCRAFT" and "TACOCRAFT TAQUERIA AND TEQUILA BAR" are the same restaurant; "KFC & SUBWAY" and "SUBWAY" are not (one brand left the site). If there is no inspection on either side to compare, the change is counted as owner change, unresolvable — reported, never silently dropped.

A change of owner can be the same people

An approved change of owner is an event in the paperwork — most often the same people moving the business into a new LLC. It is still an ownership change, and it is still counted as one. But when the concept behind the licence did not change — same name, same kitchen — we classify it as new owner, same restaurant, because the reader's question is whether a different restaurant now holds the licence.

Same-owner rename

A persistent name change: the name at one inspection differs from the name at the next, the difference still shows at the visit after that, and there was no approved owner change in the 180 days before it. One such event is counted per licence per year. Renames are how a restaurant resets its public reputation without the record underneath changing — see the name history section of the site methodology.

Licence went dark

A licence's last inspection ever was in that year, the licence is not on the active roster now, and it has not been seen in more than 400 days. We do not call a recent silence a closure: closures are confirmed late. A licence that went quiet two months ago is still "the same restaurant" on the cohort table; it only becomes a dark licence once it has been unseeable for over 400 days.

The pandemic cohort

The cohort is every licence inspected at least once in the cohort window (see the heading above for the years it actually covers), provided the 18 months of follow-up after that window have elapsed. A cohort year whose follow-up window is still open as of the data date is left out rather than reported early, so the cohort ends at the same year the yearly table does. For every licence in it we record what holds it today, in order of preference:

1. New owner, same / different restaurant — an approved owner change after the 2022 baseline. The split is by the concept the change landed on, compared with the 2020–22 baseline — and it stands even if the licence went dark afterwards, so the fact that the licence turned over is never lost to its eventual closure. A name change and an owner change within about four months of each other read as one event.
2. Same owner, new concept — a persistent name change after the baseline with no owner change: the same people, a different restaurant behind the name (again regardless of whether the licence is active today).
3. Recorded permanent closure — no turnover event on record, and our event ledger's own classification (CLOSE, permanent_closure), which requires corroborated evidence; silence alone never records a closure.
4. Licence ended, no closure record — no turnover event on record, the licence is no longer active and has been unseen for 400+ days, but nothing on record confirmed a closure. This bucket is an upper bound on "closed and unconfirmed", not a closure count.
5. Same restaurant — everything else: no change after the baseline, still active, or seen recently, still under the same concept.

Years and rates

The yearly table runs from 2018 to the most recent year with 18 months of follow-up, because a change of owner needs that much time after it to be classifiable. The denominator is the number of distinct licences inspected in the year; the rates are per-cent of that. A licence inspected in several years is in several denominators — the table measures annual turnover of the inspected stock, not the fate of one fixed set of licences. Rates are rounded to two decimals; counts are not rounded.

Computation: uv run --no-sync python -m riskyeats.cli turnover stage of the slim pipeline, or riskyeats.render.turnover.build_turnover_artifacts directly. Budget on ARGOS-class hardware: under 60 seconds, under 4 GB RSS.