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Articles covering brands that have achieved high customer satisfaction scores based on proprietary data from Merchant Centric.

10 emerging casual-dining restaurant chains consumers love10 emerging casual-dining restaurant chains consumers love

The top emerging restaurant brands generated higher guest satisfaction scores than their established peers

Alicia Kelso, Executive Editor

July 7, 2023

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The Happy Customer Index leverages proprietary data from Merchant Centric to understand which brands are checking all of the customer satisfaction boxes — from timeliness to cleanliness, and from price/value to staff demeanor.

The Happy Customer Index leverages proprietary data from Merchant Centric to understand which brands are checking all of the customer satisfaction boxes — from timeliness to cleanliness, and from price/value to staff demeanor. This data is pulled from millions of ratings, reviews and comments across sites such as Google, TripAdvisor and others.

For our index, we have taken a deeper look at three key themes — food, price/value and loyalty/referral — to determine the strongest casual dining brands related to these themes. Merchant Centric calls this measure a brand’s Theme Performance Score (TPS). If the TPS for a brand on a theme is higher than one, it indicates that guests mention the brand positively more often than negatively; for instance, a score of 3.5 indicates that guests mentioned that theme positively 3.5 times more than it was mentioned negatively. Conversely, a score of 0.5 indicates the theme is mentioned positively half as much as it is negatively.

Emerging brands are defined as having 20 locations or less during the measurement period. Per this TPS ratings system, here are the strongest emerging casual dining brands, as measured from February 2022 through January 2023.

Click through the gallery to see the top 10 emerging casual dining restaurant chains, and go here to see the top 10 established brands.

Related:10 established casual-dining restaurant chains consumers love

About the Author

Alicia Kelso

Executive Editor, Nation's Restaurant News

Alicia Kelso is the executive editor of Nation's Restaurant News. She began covering the restaurant industry in 2010 for QSRweb.com, FastCasual.com and PizzaMarketplace.com. When her son was born, she left the industry to pursue a role in higher education, but swiftly returned after realizing how much she missed the space. In filling that void, Alicia added a contributor role at Restaurant Dive and a senior contributor role at Forbes.
Her work has appeared in publications around the world, including Forbes Asia, NPR, Bloomberg, The Seattle Times, Crain's Chicago, Good Morning America and Franchise Asia Magazine.
Alicia holds a degree in journalism from Bowling Green State University, where she competed on the women's swim team. In addition to cheering for the BGSU Falcons, Alicia is a rabid Michigan fan and will talk about college football with anyone willing to engage. She lives in Louisville, Kentucky, with her wife and son.

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