Guides · For vendors

How to find restaurants and bars before they open

A restaurant cannot open without filing with the state or the city, and those filings are public. They appear weeks, sometimes months, before the first customer. A supplier or service company that reads them can make the first call, while the owner is still choosing who to buy from.

Where a new venue shows up, earliest first

#	Signal	What it tells you
1	Health-department plan reviews and pre-permit inspections	The earliest public record. The owner has submitted plans or is being inspected before a permit exists. Florida publishes plan reviews and New York City publishes pre-permit inspections.
2	Liquor license applications	Filed before the license is granted, usually while the space is being built out. Texas, California, Oregon and Oklahoma publish applications; most states publish the approved license later.
3	Newly issued licenses	The venue is approved and close to opening. Everyone who reads the same state list sees it at the same time.
4	City business license applications	Chicago publishes these. They cover every kind of business, so the food and drink ones have to be picked out.
5	Maps, reviews and social media	By the time a place shows up here it is usually open or days away, and every other vendor has seen it too.

Which of these a state publishes differs. See the state-by-state list for who publishes what, and where to read the original.

What to do with a lead

1. Check the record. Open the agency's record and confirm the address and the stage. Agencies make mistakes, and so do we.
2. Work out who decides. The licensee on the record is usually the owner or the company that owns it. A company name is a starting point; the person behind it is who you want.
3. Lead with the build-out. A venue that has applied is buying everything at once. Offer what you sell as part of getting open, with a date in mind, and not as a general introduction.
4. Move first, keep it short. The advantage of a filing is timing. A short message in the first days is worth more than a polished one a month later.

What each trade can do with the same filing

Trade	Why a new filing matters
POS and payments	A new venue picks a POS system and card processor before opening day.
Kitchen equipment and supply	The kitchen is stocked from scratch, all at once.
Insurance	Liability coverage has to be in place before the doors open.
Signs	Signage goes up during build-out.
Linen and uniforms, pest control, hood cleaning	Recurring services a venue signs up for as it opens.
Payroll, marketing, beverage distribution	A new business is setting up each of them for the first time.

Lists already sorted by trade, for the states we sell: Florida · New York. All trades.

Do it yourself, or use a feed

Everything above is public, so you can build it yourself: pull each agency's list every day, remove duplicates, filter to food and drink, and look up the owner. That works if you have someone to do it every day. Ribbon Leads does that daily reading for 8 states and emails the new filings, with a phone number and website where we can match them. The Monday list is free; the daily list is $49 a month for one state or $129 for all of them, with a 7-day free trial.

By state

Texas · Florida · California · Oregon · New York · Missouri · Illinois (Chicago)