How can I find a shapefile of all restaurants and bakeries in California? Or a free list of addresses to Geocode?

[MelissaTraverso1]

Hi I am currently trying to search for restaurant (of all types) and bakeries in California. I am thinking finding a shapefile of this is pretty unlikely but was wondering where I might find a free comprehensive list of addresses that I could then geocode within arcmap? Can google maps or google earth provide this for me?

Thanks,

Melissa

[JoeBorgione]

Have you tried Google?  How are you going to know if you don't start digging?

There must be a trade association that could provide you addresses of members.  Or you can start calling city business license departments. Statewide? Without even knowing your age, my guess is that'll keep you going until retirement...

[TimWitt2]

Here in Florida, if you are part of the government you can go to the department of transportation gis page and download a shapefile that has all restaurants in florida in it.

I know it is not what Melissa is looking for, but some states seem to have it

[JoeBorgione]

Wow.  That's a nice piece of data.  Maybe the state health dept has what she's after.

[JoeBorgione]

The term Big Data comes to mind.....

[MelissaTraverso1]

I typed in "Restaurants in California" in google earth. A ton of points all over the map popped up. I zoomed into these locations to check that they were restaurants and it looks like they are. The only issue is roughly 20 of these points actually show up in my table of contents in google earth that I can save to my places and use these addresses to geocode. Is it possible to get all the points that show up on the map without having to go one by one and adding a placemark?

Thanks,

Melissa

[ChristiNelson1]

If you just need names and point locations, try the Geographic Names Information System U.S. Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) - Data.gov

Or Open Street Map should have Points Of Interest that include restaurants. http://download.geofabrik.de/north-america/us/california.html

http://download.geofabrik.de/north-america/us/california.html

A hub of free gis data exists here Free GIS Datasets - Categorised List. 

[SteveCole]

I think Joe Borgione​ is on the right track with the Health Department or possibly department of licensing. Restaurants need licenses to operate so you may  be able to get a tabular list that you would then need to geocode. I did something similar in my local county to map out the locations of all hotels using the license list provided by my state's Department of Licensing.

[LauraCremin]

Hi Melissa,

Cnngis.org sounds like just what you are looking for. You can download a list of food retailers + addresses for a geographic region you select, and filter it by food-store type (general grocery, convenience group, etc.). Then it just has to be geocoded.

Open up the Layer List (top left-hand corner), and there is a drop down to filter by Retail Food Channel. I can't remember the categories, but I believe once downloaded you'll see another column that further categorizes with a bakery group.

Also, I'm not sure how often it is updated (you'd have to check, but at least yearly).

Some of it can be a little messy (stores closed, duplicate addresses and store names, etc.) so it is a good idea to sift through it a bit and possibly ground-truth some with google maps & yelp. I found it to be generally good data!

[MelissaTraverso1]

Hi Laura,

It looks like the most it will let me download are 1000 features at a time. It would be hard to break down California and make sure I get 1000 within each section of california. If I am wrong about this please let me know. 

Thanks,

Melissa