F&B Intelligence: Identifying Food Concepts That Drive Footfall and Anticipating Food & Beverage Trends

Food & Beverage teams must balance attractiveness, offer diversity, and profitability.
The selection of the right F&B operators directly impacts footfall, dwell time, and the overall perception of a shopping centre, retail park, or outlet. Traditional tools—sales history, intuition, internal benchmarks—remain useful but cannot anticipate shifts in local tastes or detect emerging concepts before competitors do.

The Challenge

Traditional analyses provide a necessary framework, but overlook several critical signals tied to real consumer demand:

Challenge #1: Identifying new food concepts in a specific geographic area

Bubble tea → mochi → corn dogs → ramen bars → specialty coffee → Asian desserts…
F&B phenomena emerge in online search behaviour long before they appear physically.

Challenge #2: Adapting the F&B offer to the cultural specifics of a territory

In some countries or regions, a strong category may be replaced by a completely different mental equivalent
(ice cream shop ≈ waffle shop ≈ Korean dessert concept).

Challenge #3: Evaluating whether a food trend is structural or just a short-term buzz

• “korean street food”
• “vegan comfort food”
• “japanese bakery”
• “artisan pizza”
• “healthy bowls”
• “tablette dubai”
• “specialty coffee shop”

These micro-trends can represent true long-term opportunities… or short-lived hype impossible to detect with internal data.

The Yourban.ai Solution — Search Intelligence Applied to F&B for Shopping Centres

Thanks to its trend detection and demand analysis capabilities, Yourban.ai enables you to build your F&B offer directly from real consumer demand.

You can, for example:

• Identify fast-growing F&B categories in your catchment area.
  Is your territory more bubble tea, cinnamon rolls, or tablette Dubai?
• Identify the most popular culinary specialties in the area:
  Is your catchment more Italian restaurant or Indian restaurant?
• Assess the real performance of a trend
  (example: a concept is going viral on TikTok — but is it actually popular locally?)
• Evaluate competitive dynamics and your brand’s share of consumer attention.
• Identify which geographic areas to target to gain market share against competitors.

With Yourban.ai, you can build an F&B strategy based on real tastes, not intuition.

Outcomes for Shopping Centres

Before Yourban.ai

• Decisions based on historical data and incoming opportunities
• No visibility into local culinary trends
• Hard to understand real demand in the catchment area
• Risk of onboarding low-attractiveness concepts
• Difficulty justifying decisions to leadership or landlords

With Yourban.ai

• F&B selection based on real local demand
• Early detection of high-potential concepts before competitors
• A stronger, data-driven food mix
• Lower failure rate for new F&B operators
• Increased footfall, dwell time, and customer satisfaction
• A more innovative, trend-setting positioning for the centre