Seeking GIS data for fast food industry?

Ian Spiro at http://www.fastfoodmaps.com/ scraped these data nationally in 2007. His site has a great interactive map; maybe you can get the data too (or scrape them!). Another place where you can find pubs and restaurants, at this time, is TheWebMiner Geo

KFC have a store locator. Behind this is a FindNearBy web service that can be sent lat longs.

http://www.kfc.com/storelocator/services/MWS.asmx?op=FindNearby

You can issue SOAP requests to this and get a nice list of stores in JSON. Alternatively just manually run a query for Ohio and copy the JSON reponse in FireBug.

{
    "Latitude": 40.393947,
    "Longitude": -82.488953,
    "Distance": 11.704096790435619,
    "Address": "301 West High Street",
    "City": "Mount Vernon",
    "StateProvince": "OH",
    "PostalCode": "43050",
    "Country": "US",
    "cssProperties": [
        {
            "Name": "BusinessPhone",
            "Value": "(740)392-4900"
        },
        {
            "Name": "Buffet",
            "Value": false
        },
        {
            "Name": "LateNightHours",
            "Value": false
        }
    ]
},

A similar approach can probably be taken with other chains. For example, the McDonalds Restaurant Locator performs an AJAX request based on the coordinates of the map, and returns the matching restaurants in a JSON payload. You can send a request with your given coordinates, eg:

http://rl.mcdonalds.com/googleapps/GoogleSearchUSAction.do?method=searchLocation&searchTxtLatlng=(42.3600825%2C-71.05888010000001)&actionType=searchRestaurant&language=en&country=us

"results":[
{
"name":"",
"longitude":-71.058975,
"latitude":42.356899,
"district":"",
"telephone":"(617)557-0089",
"storetype":"STOREFRONT",
"storeType":"STOREFRONT",
"siteid":"201062",
"natlStrNumber":"31643",
"storeurl":"http://mylocalmcds.com/31643",
"applicationurl":"http://mylocalmcds.com/31643",
"addresses":[
{
"address":"<h3>329 WASHINGTON ST<\/h3>, BOSTON MA 02108 (617)557-0089 "
}
]....

Another potential data source could be OpenStreetMap. Look for features with amenity="fast_food" :)