Ask any F&B director to describe their competitive set, and you will get one of two answers. The first is vague and confident: “we know who we are up against, roughly”. The second is specific and incomplete: “the place across the street, the hotel down the road, and that new one near the metro that opened last summer”.
Neither is a view. Both are a loose collection of impressions assembled over a year of walking past windows, scrolling Instagram, and hearing things from people on your team who heard things from other people on their teams.
What a competitive view actually requires
A competitive view requires three things an anecdote cannot provide:
Time-stamped change detection. You need to know when your comp set moved, not just that they have moved. The price that was €32 in September and is €36 now tells a story — the price that you remember being “around €35” tells you nothing.
Named comparators. The comp set is not the dining scene in your city. It is five to eight named venues with sufficient overlap in format, price tier, and audience that their moves are directly relevant to yours. Without names, there is nothing to track.
Structured signal types. Not all comp-set moves are equal. A pricing change on the best-selling dish is a material event. A pricing change on a seasonal appetiser served twice a week is not. A structured view distinguishes them.
What is actually public
The moves that matter are mostly in the open. Pricing lives on Google, TheFork, Booking.com, and the venue’s own site. Menu changes show up in the same places, with lag measured in days. Review velocity and sentiment are public by construction. Photo updates, profile changes, promotional launches — all public.
The work is not gathering the signal. The work is noticing it, in time, while it still matters.
Why most operators miss it
Because it accumulates quietly. One pricing change in August goes unnoticed because you are working on August. By the time you look up in February, three comp-set venues have shifted tier, one has added a tasting menu, two have moved on photography, and your pricing is no longer where you thought it was. The cost is not a dramatic event. It is a slow drift.
The remedy is not more vigilance on your part. The remedy is aggregation — a weekly look at what moved, ranked by how much it matters to your operation. That is what competitive intelligence in F&B is actually for.