New Food Service License Leads - Chicago Restaurant Openings

Find newly licensed Chicago restaurants and food businesses at the moment they are preparing to open or have just opened. This Actor turns official initial Retail Food Establishment license records into a clean, scheduled lead feed.

Built for teams that sell to new food-service businesses:

• Restaurant equipment, smallwares, refrigeration, and food distributors
• POS, payments, online ordering, payroll, and accounting providers
• Insurance brokers, staffing firms, cleaning services, and pest control
• Signage, security, internet, waste, and opening-day service vendors

What the signal means

The Actor returns City of Chicago records where the application type is ISSUE, the license type is Retail Food Establishment, and the city marks the license as issued. That is a useful opening-time signal, not a generic restaurant directory entry.

The source is the City of Chicago Department of Business Affairs and Consumer Protection open-data API. It is public, requires no login or API key, and is updated daily by the city.

Quick start

1. Set the Lookback window (14 days is a good first run).
2. Optionally add Chicago neighborhoods or ZIP codes.
3. Leave Only new since last run on for a scheduled delta feed.
4. Choose a Max results cap and click Start.

At the intended future Console price of $0.005 per saved lead plus a $0.005 run-start event, 100 returned leads would cost about $0.505. Pricing is not configured by this code; see pricing.md in the project directory for the recommendation.

Output fields

Each saved record can include:

• Signal: leadType, jurisdiction, status, eventDate, issuedDate
• License: recordId, licenseId, licenseNumber, licenseCode, licenseDescription, licenseStatusCode, applicationType
• Business: businessName, legalName
• Location: address, city, state, zip, neighborhood, communityArea, ward, latitude, longitude
• Timeline: applicationCreatedDate, requirementsCompleteDate, approvedForIssuanceDate, licenseStartDate, expirationDate
• Provenance: source, sourceUrl, scrapedAt

Fields the city leaves empty are omitted instead of being filled with guesses.

Delta mode and deduplication

With Only new since last run enabled, the Actor stores stable Chicago license-record IDs in its named key-value store. Scheduled runs return only records not delivered by an earlier delta run. Duplicate rows inside the same run are also suppressed. The registry is retained for 400 days so it stays bounded while covering normal annual schedules.

Reliability behavior

• HTTP/JSON only; no browser, login, CAPTCHA, or credential is used.
• Chicago's one-second crawl delay is honored between API pages and retry attempts.
• Transient 429 and server errors use bounded retries and honor Retry-After.
• One malformed record is logged and skipped without losing the rest of the run.
• maxResults is enforced before additional leads are saved.

Honest limits

• Coverage is Chicago only.
• These are newly issued initial food-service licenses, not pending applications and not health-inspection records.
• Issuance means the business is legally licensed; it does not prove an exact opening date or that the business has not already opened.
• The source does not provide email addresses or phone numbers in this dataset, and the Actor does not invent or enrich them.
• A license filing is a sales signal, not proof that the business wants to be contacted.