Tijuana Flats expands into new Southeast markets with confidence and strategic SiteZeus partnership

Fast casual Tex-Mex restaurant will use A.I. solutions to power data-driven growth in new markets

TAMPA, Fla. (June 28, 2021) — SiteZeus is pleased to announce its newest partnership with Tijuana Flats, an iconic fast-casual Tex-Mex restaurant with over 120 locations across Florida, North Carolina, Indiana, and Virginia. This partnership will allow the restaurant brand to execute its new expansion strategy with A.I.-powered solutions needed to make intelligent, location-based decisions.

Using SiteZeus we’ve already decided to pass on two sites we were strongly considering. It turns out we were ignoring some key factors, and we didn’t realize it until we ran the sites in SiteZeus and revenue potentials came back low. SiteZeus showed us that those weren’t the best trade areas, and that we would be making a $1 million mistake if we developed there.”

Eric Taylor, Tijuana Flats Vice President of Real Estate and Development

He said the strategic partnership will assist their experienced real-estate teams to locate high-performing locations and help compound revenue as the brand continues its expansion. “While we’ve used other market planning solutions in the past, SiteZeus is filling a huge gap in our market planning strategy,” he added.

As seasoned real estate teams at large multi-unit brands know, growing beyond existing home markets is extremely challenging. Without the right tools, finding the next winning market, determining its potential, and predicting how many above-AUV sites it can support is more intuition-based than data-driven.

Tijuana Flats now has the advantage with SiteZeus, a partnership that lets the brand combine the art and science of market planning. Now the real estate team at Tijuana Flats can run comprehensive white space analysis within hours. It can take advantage of additional filters, too, such as setting minimum distance between two sites, which can help weigh the true market potential and answer how many locations the brand can open in a market without cannibalizing existing sales.

How brands can identify new markets with SiteZeus’ white space analysis

The partnership allows Tijuana Flats’ to streamline its market planning process further. As the real estate team starts looking at specific franchisee-proposed sites, the real estate team can validate the opportunity in minutes. By simply leveraging SiteZeus’ sales forecasting solution, the real estate team can “drop a pin” at any location and get highly accurate sales forecasts right away. They’ll learn how much Tijuana Flats will likely make at that site, the types of customer groups that will drive sales in that trade area, and what kind of store to build, understand traffic behavior, and more.

It’s a great advantage to have the ability to drive to a proposed site and pull a sales forecast while on site from my laptop, that kind of speed to market planning can mean the difference between getting a prime real estate and losing it to the competition.”

said Taylor, referring to SiteZeus’ user-friendly interface.

Experience SiteZeus solutions in under 60 seconds

SiteZeus CEO Hannibal Baldwin acknowledges that making real estate decisions in a new market can be very challenging. “We are excited to empower great brands such as Tijuana Flats to make those really tough real estate decisions using data-backed and confident analysis,” he said. “It is our mission to help multi-unit brands pick better locations, and we are excited to help Tijuana Flats do just that.”