Chicken Restaurant Site Selection Criteria

Chicken restaurant site selection criteria vary sharply by brand, and they come down to three data points: demographics within a trade area, co-tenancy mix, and traffic thresholds. Some chains are adding units aggressively while others are closing stores. This breakdown uses REGIS Online merchant location data to show what each brand's actual sites look like, not just what their franchise disclosures say.

Which Chicken Brands Are Expanding, And Which Are Shrinking

Current press often highlights how the chicken segment of retail is booming, and it is, but not uniformly. The category is redistributing units from its legacy brands to newer ones.

And when you see the data you can see the trends in the location data. Some of the more traditional chicken restaurants are struggling to maintain, while new brands are aggressively expanding.

Franchisor behavior supports this as well. Slim Chickens launched a development fund in August paying qualifying franchisees up to $200,000 per restaurant, aimed specifically at inline and end cap builds. Shrinking brands don't write those checks.

Chicken Restaurant Site Selection Criteria, Brand By Brand

Looking at the data behind each existing location tells a different story. A brand's published criteria sheet is one thing, what the signed lease agreements actually show is another.

Two patterns stood out. Chick-fil-A and Dave's Hot Chicken's locations sit in areas where the daytime population is nearly as high as the residential. This shows their strategy, they are building in locations that are near a mix of residential, but also near strong business districts.

Income tells a similar story. Church's Chicken's average income sits at $70,098; the areas around Raising Cane's are significantly higher at $94,123. Brands adding units tend to sit in higher income areas. Brands losing locations tend to sit in lower income ones.

Chicken Restaurant Common Co-tenants

Because co-tenancy can be another vital factor, especially as markets fill with competition, we dived deeper and pulled the common co-tenants for each brand.

Starbucks As A Co-tenant Is A Good Thing

Among the growing brands included in this comparison, Starbucks co-tenancy ranges from 79% to 95%. KFC and Church's Chicken, the two contracting brands shown, come in at 58% and 37%.

Chicken Competition Is A Good Thing

Chick-fil-A is also a top co-tenant for brands that are growing. Chicken Salad Chick (68%), Raising Cane's (65%), and Dave's Hot Chicken (62%) cluster more than half their locations near the category leader. For a broker, that means an existing Chick-fil-A should not automatically disqualify a corridor. The right competitive cluster may actually resemble the locations these growing concepts already choose.

Certain Co-Tenants Are A Bad Thing

Dollar stores, auto parts retailers, and prepaid wireless carriers show up near most brands in this category, growing and shrinking alike. Wingstop, Raising Cane's, and El Pollo Loco all sit near a Dollar Tree and an AutoZone at rates comparable to Church's Chicken and KFC. Church's stands out for depth rather than presence: it's the only brand in the category with three separate discount or dollar retailers (Dollar General, Dollar Tree, Family Dollar) and two prepaid carriers (MetroPCS, Cricket) all appearing at 40% or more of its locations. That concentration, not the individual retailers, is the more telling signal, and it likely reflects trade area income more than the co-tenants causing anything on their own.

Traffic Counts For Chicken Restaurant

Traffic counts vary less than the demographics do, but they're not flat either. Ten of the twelve brands here cluster between 20,200 and 38,500 AADT on their nearest major intersection. Bojangles' is the exception at 46,400, well clear of everyone else in the category. Either way, a high traffic count alone won't tell you which brand is a good fit - what matters more is how many customers that brand actually needs walking through the door.

How Much Customer Traffic Do Chicken Brands Generate?

Mobile visit data shows some chicken restaurants pull dramatically more traffic per location than others, and the highest performers do this consistently across multiple markets, in multiple states. Chick-fil-A leads the field by a wide margin, more than 20,000 visits more per location. While many others sit comfortably above 22,000.

The strong pull that chicken restaurants have is consistent, and replicable. And that replicable draw is exactly the kind of retailer everyone would want in their center.

How to Attract a Chicken Restaurant to Your Shopping Center

Site selection used to run on a handful of variables. ICSC's own research points out that retailers now weigh far more data than that — and most workflows still pull it from four or five disconnected tools. Matching an open lease to a proven profile takes those pieces working together, not apart.

1. Run a void analysis to find ideal candidates

Before you pitch anyone, run a void analysis and confirm the brand is actually missing from the trade area, not just missing from your side of the street. This is also your cannibalization check: if the brand already has a unit close enough that a new site would just split its own sales, you don't have a pitch, you have a conflict. Most site packages die right here.

2. Build the trade areas the brand actually uses

Where you can, build a ten minute drive time trade area around your site and check it against the benchmarks above. This accounts for the highway, the river, and the rail line a radius doesn't. The radius numbers in this article are still a fair proxy in most markets; a drive time sharpens the read in anything with a real geographic divider running through it.

3. Lead with the demographics they care about

Chick-fil-A runs 93% daytime-to-resident, Dave's runs 91%. Whatever your number is, put it in the first paragraph of your site package, not buried on page four where nobody reading fifteen packages a week is going to find it.

4. Match your co-tenants against your prospects

Skip the Subway and the Starbucks on your cover page. Every chicken brand sits near those, so they tell the prospect nothing about your center. Pitching Dave's Hot Chicken? Lead with your Chipotle, your Target, your ULTA. Pitching Church's Chicken? Lead with your Family Dollar and your auto parts. Match the co-tenants to the brand you're actually in the room for.

All four run in one place. REGIS Online combine merchant location data across 900+ retailers, void analysis, drive-time trade areas, co-tenancy match, and traffic counts by time of day, so you can build a brand-specific site package in one session instead of assembling it from four sources.

Last Modified September 14, 2025