Who's opening, read from the public record every morning
Ribbon Leads exists because one of the best sales signals in the restaurant business is published every day, and almost nobody reads it.
Before a restaurant opens, it sends its kitchen plans to the health department. It applies for a liquor license. The city inspects it before it can serve. Every one of those steps is a public record, published by the agency involved, and each one tells a supplier the same thing: this business is about to buy everything a new venue needs.
The trouble is that the records are spread across more than a dozen government data feeds in different formats. Some are open-data APIs, some are daily spreadsheet downloads, and some are web tables that only load in a real browser. Sales reps who know about them check one or two by hand when they remember. Most never do.
So we read all of them every morning and turn them into one clean list. Each venue is sorted into a category from its name and license type, matched against public map listings to add a phone number and website when the address and name agree, and ordered earliest stage first, so plans filed in April rank above a license issued yesterday. Then it goes to the people who sell to new venues: POS and payments, food and beverage distributors, insurance agents, kitchen equipment dealers and contractors, sign makers, linen services, hood cleaners, pest control, payroll, marketing agencies and commercial brokers.
What we are not
We're not affiliated with any state or city agency. We never contact the venues in the data, and we don't sell subscriber information. We don't claim the records are error-free: an agency typo becomes our typo. If you spot something wrong, tell us and we'll fix it at the source.
Who runs it
Ribbon Leads is built and run by Station Automations Group LLC, a small software company in Houston that also makes websites and office software for local businesses under the Station name. The collection runs on a schedule every morning; the people behind it read every message sent through the contact form and every reply to our emails.