🏛️ Minnesota Franchise Registrations Scraper

🕒 Last updated: 2026-05-05

Minnesota requires franchisors to register with the state before selling any franchise locally. That means the state keeps a public record of every franchisor that has filed or renewed, going back over a decade.

This tool gives you direct access to that registry. Search by brand, franchisor name, year, or document type and get structured records for every filing, each with a direct link to the official PDF on file with the state.

The Minnesota Franchise Registrations Scraper collects franchise filing records from the Minnesota Department of Commerce, including franchisor names, brand names, document types, filing years, file numbers, and direct download links to FDDs, financial statements, and franchise agreements.

✨ What Does It Do

• 🏢 Full Franchise Registry - access every franchisor that has registered or renewed in Minnesota, with legal entity names and brand names
• 📄 Direct FDD Links - get download links to Clean FDDs, Final FDDs, Financial Statements, and Franchise Agreements filed with the state
• 📅 10+ Years of History - retrieve filings going back over a decade to track how franchisors have grown, changed, or exited the market
• 🔢 Official File Numbers - capture the Minnesota file number for each registrant for cross-referencing and compliance work
• 🔍 Flexible Filters - narrow results by franchisor name, brand, document type, year, or file number

🔧 Input

• Max Items - how many records to collect. Free users: up to 100. Paid users: up to 1,000,000
• Document Type - filter by filing type. Clean FDD and Final FDD are the most relevant for investor research. Leave blank for all types
• Franchisor Name - partial match on the legal entity name (e.g. "McDonald" finds "McDonald's USA, LLC")
• Franchise Brand Name - filter by the brand name (e.g. "Subway", "Anytime Fitness")
• Year - filter by filing year (e.g. "2024", "2025"). Defaults to 2025
• File Number - look up a specific Minnesota file number
• Document ID - look up a specific document reference number
• Content Search - search within document content

Example - get all Clean FDDs from 2024:

{
  "documentType": "Clean FDD",
  "year": "2024",
  "maxItems": 500
}

Example - search a specific brand:

{
  "franchisor": "Subway",
  "maxItems": 50
}

📊 Output

Each record includes the following fields. Download as JSON, CSV, or Excel.

🏷️ Document ID	🏢 Franchisor	🎯 Franchise name
📄 Document type	📅 Year	🔢 File number
📝 Notes	📬 Received date	➕ Added on
🔗 PDF download link	🗺️ State	🕐 Scraped at

💎 Why Use the Minnesota Franchise Registrations Scraper?

Feature	Our Actor
Official Minnesota Department of Commerce source	✔️
Direct PDF download links to FDDs	✔️
50+ document type filters	✔️
Filter by franchisor, brand, year, or file number	✔️
10+ years of filing history	✔️
No login or authentication required	✔️
Free tier: up to 100 records per run	✔️
Paid tier: up to 1,000,000 records per run	✔️
Export to JSON, CSV, or Excel	✔️

📋 How to Use

1. Sign Up: Create a free account with $5 credit
2. Find the Tool: Search for "Minnesota Franchise Registrations Scraper" in the Apify Store
3. Run It: Set your filters and click Start. Results appear immediately

No coding, no setup, no technical knowledge required.

🎯 Business Use Cases

• ✅ Franchise Investor - pull all current Clean FDD filings to get the official disclosure documents before committing capital to any franchise opportunity. The PDF link gives you the complete document in one click
• 📊 Franchise Broker - build and refresh a current list of all franchisors registered in Minnesota. Filter by year to track new entrants and renewal activity across your target market
• 🔍 Due Diligence Analyst - search by franchisor name to pull every filing they have ever submitted, including amendments, financial statements, and registration orders, going back over a decade

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✨ Why choose this Actor

	Capability
🎯	Built for the job. Scoped specifically to this data source so you skip the parser engineering entirely.
🔖	Structured output. Clean, typed fields ready for analysis, dashboards, or downstream pipelines.
⚡	Fast. Optimized request patterns return results in seconds, not minutes.
🔁	Always fresh. Every run pulls live data, so the dataset reflects the source as of run time.
🌐	No infra to manage. Apify handles proxies, retries, scaling, scheduling, and storage.
🛡️	Reliable. Battle-tested across many runs and edge cases, with graceful error handling.
🚫	No code required. Configure in the UI, run from CLI, schedule via cron, or call from any language with the Apify SDK.

📊 Production-grade structured data without the engineering overhead of building and maintaining your own scraper.

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📈 How it compares to alternatives

Approach	Cost	Coverage	Refresh	Filters	Setup
⭐ Minnesota Franchise Registrations Scraper (this Actor)	$5 free credit, then pay-per-use	Full source coverage	Live per run	Source-native filters supported	⚡ 2 min
Build your own scraper	Engineering hours	Full once built	Whenever you maintain it	Custom code	🐢 Days to weeks
Paid managed APIs	$$$ monthly	Vendor-defined	Live	Vendor-defined	⏳ Hours
Third-party data dumps	Varies	Subset, often stale	Periodic	None	🕒 Variable

Pick this Actor when you want broad coverage, server-side filtering, and no pipeline maintenance.

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🚀 How to use

1. 📝 Sign up. Create a free account with $5 credit (takes 2 minutes).
2. 🌐 Open the Actor. Go to the Minnesota Franchise Registrations Scraper page on the Apify Store.
3. 🎯 Set input. Configure the input fields in the form (or paste a JSON), then set maxItems.
4. 🚀 Run it. Click Start and let the Actor collect your data.
5. 📥 Download. Grab your results in the Dataset tab as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML.

⏱️ Total time from signup to downloaded dataset: 3-5 minutes. No coding required.

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💼 Business use cases

📊 Data & Analytics Build trend reports and dashboards from live source data Feed BI tools, warehouses, and ML pipelines with structured records Run periodic snapshots to track changes over time Compare segments, regions, or categories with consistent fields	🏢 Operations & Strategy Monitor competitor moves, pricing, and inventory shifts Build internal directories and lookup tools backed by current data Power workflows that depend on fresh source records Cut manual data-gathering time from hours to minutes
🎯 Marketing & Growth Identify market opportunities and trending topics Research target audiences and customer personas at scale Power lead-generation pipelines with verified records Track sentiment, reviews, or social signals over time	🛠️ Engineering & Product Prototype features that need real-world data without owning a crawler Replace fragile in-house scrapers with a managed Actor Wire datasets into your apps via the Apify API or webhooks Skip the proxy, retry, and parsing maintenance entirely

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🌟 Beyond business use cases

Data like this powers more than commercial workflows. The same structured records support research, education, civic projects, and personal initiatives.

🎓 Research and academia Empirical datasets for papers, thesis work, and coursework Longitudinal studies tracking changes across snapshots Reproducible research with cited, versioned data pulls Classroom exercises on data analysis and ethical scraping	🎨 Personal and creative Side projects, portfolio demos, and indie app launches Data visualizations, dashboards, and infographics Content research for bloggers, YouTubers, and podcasters Hobbyist collections and personal trackers
🤝 Non-profit and civic Transparency reporting and accountability projects Advocacy campaigns backed by public-interest data Community-run databases for local issues Investigative journalism on public records	🧪 Experimentation Prototype AI and machine-learning pipelines with real data Validate product-market hypotheses before engineering spend Train small domain-specific models on niche corpora Test dashboard concepts with live input

🔌 Integrate with any app

Minnesota Franchise Registrations Scraper connects to any cloud service via Apify integrations:

• Make - Automate multi-step workflows
• Zapier - Connect with 5,000+ apps
• Slack - Get run notifications in your channels
• Airbyte - Pipe results into your warehouse
• GitHub - Trigger runs from commits and releases
• Google Drive - Export datasets straight to Sheets

You can also use webhooks to trigger downstream actions when a run finishes. Push fresh data into your product backend, or alert your team in Slack.

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🤖 Ask an AI assistant about this scraper

Open a ready-to-send prompt about this ParseForge actor in the AI of your choice:

• 💬 ChatGPT
• 🧠 Claude
• 🔍 Perplexity
• 🅒 Copilot

❓ Frequently Asked Questions

🔗 Integrate with Any App

• Make - automate workflows
• Zapier - connect 5000+ apps
• Slack - get notifications
• Google Drive - export to spreadsheets
• Airbyte - data pipelines

🤝 More ParseForge Actors

• Franchise Direct Scraper - extract franchise opportunities listed on FranchiseDirect with investment ranges, fees, and franchisor details
• FINRA BrokerCheck Scraper - pull broker and firm registration data from FINRA's public database for financial due diligence
• BizBuySell Scraper - collect business-for-sale listings including asking price, revenue, cash flow, and industry

🚀 Ready to Start?

Create a free account with $5 credit and collect your first 100 results for free. No coding, no setup.

🆘 Need Help?

• Check the FAQ section above for common questions
• Visit the Apify support page for documentation and tutorials
• Contact us to request a new scraper, propose a custom project, or report an issue at Tally contact form

⚠️ Disclaimer

This Actor is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the Minnesota Department of Commerce or any government agency. All trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners.

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