CUSTOMER STORYBurger King UK Drives Profitable Store Investments

Boosting Forecasting Accuracy and Enabling Growth with Location Intelligence

restaurants

employees

5000 -10,000

Overview

Burger King UK (BKUK) are Master Franchise for Burger King (Restaurant Brands International®) and they operate a network of more than 280 restaurants across the UK, with an additional 280 restaurants operated by Franchisees.

Restaurants are located in traditional high street and shopping centre locations, alongside travel sector (transport hubs and motorway services), retail parks, and Drive Thrus.

Drive Thru restaurants currently represent only about 20% of the estate, but they form a major component of BKUK’s expansion strategy. Alongside this growth strategy, the company is investing heavily in remodeling its estate of restaurants and planning property strategy across the UK to meet the ever-evolving consumer requirements, especially Home Delivery and Click & Collect.

Managing this growth is complex. Investment decisions must consider restaurant formats, shifting consumer behaviors, cannibalisation, and predict performance across five distinct sales channels: Drive Thru, dine-in, takeaway, Home Delivery, and Click & Collect.

INDUSTRY Retail

COMPANY OVERVIEW

Headquartered in London, England
560+ Restaurants
5,000 – 10,000 employees

SOLUTIONSpectrum Spatial Insights

Challenge

Opening or remodeling a restaurant entails a major capital investment with significant financial risk, requiring a high degree of confidence in site selection and performance forecasting. Given the complexities described above, BKUK required a reliable way to:

Develop a strategic expansion plan, pinpointing the best locations for new restaurants – especially Drive Thrus – to meet growth targets.
Reduce the time to produce restaurant investment cases, to allow BKUK to react faster to opportunities.
Predict and manage cannibalisation of sales from existing restaurants.
The solution had to integrate deep market insights, competitive context, store format, and channel sales predictions to support both macro-level strategy (where to expand) and BKUK’s internal micro-level assessments including decisions regarding visibility, signage, and accessibility.

Solution

Precisely’s location planning solution was selected by BKUK for its proven ability to deliver accurate, actionable forecasts in the QSR sector. This solution combines powerful web-based mapping software, robust data, hybrid spatial and machine learning predictive models, and expert advisory services in a hosted platform that enables business to uncover patterns, visualize opportunities, and make smarter location decisions.

Early testing of the solution showed strong accuracy—even with a limited dataset—meeting BKUK’s critical requirements for reliable forecasting and a faster process to compete for prime locations.

The solution has enabled BK UK to:

Identify high-potential trade areas, retail parks, and roadside locations for expansion.
Develop accurate channel sales predictions.
Determine the best comparables for restaurant performance benchmarking.
Make confident, data-driven investment decisions for new openings and remodels.
Model sales cannibalisation with precision – this is especially important for assessing the impact of home delivery on restaurant profitability.
Accelerate production of sharable, interactive executive site packs including sales estimates, impacts, key drives alongside various data overlays such as mobility, traffic and geodemographics.

Results

Since implementation, BKUK has achieved its most accurate sales forecasts to date, with predictions typically falling within ±10% of observed performance – a material improvement over a prior approach.

Key outcomes include:

Multi-Channel Forecasting: Accurate predictions across all five sales channels, even with limited comparable restaurants.
White-Space Identification: Rapid identification of regions and corridors with the strongest potential for new development, enabling faster decisions and competitive advantage.
Advanced Cannibalisation Modeling: Reliable assessments of margin impact and revenue potential before committing to new openings.
Easily Sharable Real-Time Reporting: Key business stakeholders can access all the latest data needed to make informed decisions confidently and quickly.

As BKUK’s forecasting solution evolves, real-world performance data is continuously integrated, ensuring models reflect current market conditions—not outdated baselines, and this will be delivered through annual system and periodic real time sales updates.

Why It Matters

With Precisely, Burger King UK has built a scalable foundation for smarter, faster, and more profitable growth. The solution empowers the broader team to easily create and share insights based on powerful analytic models and robust market data. BKUK is well equipped to balance expansion with margin protection, securing prime locations ahead of competitors and adapting to changing consumer behaviors.