How Wingstop translated digital demand into data-led location planning and scalable UK growth
Summary
Wingstop is one of the UK’s most exciting fast-food brands, with 1.1 million followers and ~70% of sales coming from 16-34-year-olds. CACI helped Wingstop translate this digital demand into real-world value by combining multiple data sources to determine how many restaurants the market could support, which towns to prioritise and where to place new sites.
The result was an interactive tool that removes subjectivity and outdated retail logic from expansion planning. Instead, Wingstop can dynamically assess opportunities and build a repeatable growth engine to identify total market capacity and maximise market share, brand awareness and ROI without overinvesting in its estate.
Company size
1,000+
Industry
Retail
Services used
Products used
Challenge
Wingstop UK needed a repeatable way to convert strong consumer demand into the right network decisions. Its primary challenges were:
Translating fast-growing digital and cultural popularity into sustainable, real-world restaurant expansion.
Prioritising the strongest towns and cities without overinvesting in locations that could dilute returns.
Balancing eat-in, takeaway and delivery potential against customer behaviour, store performance, footfall, demographics, competition and destination strength.
Giving decision-makers a consistent, accessible evidence base to reduce subjectivity and accelerate site approval.
Solution
To understand market potential, brand alignment and where Wingstop should grow next, CACI developed a bespoke national location strategy combining Wingstop and CACI data. The approach brought multiple performance metrics together in an easily interpretable framework to identify the towns, cities and locations with the strongest potential.
The data included:
- Eat-in versus takeaway opportunity: Overall sales, transactional spend, customer behaviour, store performance, workplace population, residential population, footfall and competitor strength.
- Delivery dynamics in each location: Retail destination strength (e.g. size of retail centre, volume of stores occupied, overall spend levels, leisure/retail mix), delivery catchments (e.g. public transport, ease of access).
- Brand potential: Demographic profiles combined with catchment metrics (e.g. age, wealth, brand preferences).
With overall market capacity and UK growth potential established, CACI identified priority towns, viable retail destinations and micro-locations for future restaurants. This multi-channel view helped Wingstop prioritise opportunities based on their potential to drive sales, meet customer demand and build long-term brand visibility.
These results were presented in a dynamic, scorecard-led framework, giving Wingstop a practical way to compare opportunities consistently. This gave decision-makers, internal stakeholders and investors greater confidence as they reached 100 UK restaurants.
Locations were not judged purely on property availability or historic retail logic, but on their ability to build sales, serve customer demand and amplify the Wingstop brand.
Results
Through this partnership, Wingstop gained a self-serve, repeatable growth engine that supports immediate site decisions and long-term estate planning. The success of the initial programme has led to the next iteration of the strategy, using updated store, customer and market evidence.
- Since September 2025, Wingstop has used the location strategy and scorecard framework to support investment decisions on more than 50 new restaurant opportunities, providing a consistent, evidence-based approach to site selection across its UK expansion programme.
- The brand has opened 34 new restaurants during this period, expanding its estate while maintaining confidence in location quality and long-term performance.
- Alongside its data-led expansion strategy, turnover has increased by 25%, as Wingstop continues turning consumer demand and cultural momentum into commercial growth.
- Wingstop now operates 100 UK restaurants, reinforcing its position as one of the UK’s fastest-growing restaurant brands.
