Data report · Greater Manchester

The state of Greater Manchester's new food scene

We took every food business that recently registered to trade across the ten boroughs, 1,041 of them, and looked at where they're opening, what they are, and who's behind them. Here's what the data shows.

Greater Manchester is opening food businesses faster than most people realise. Across the ten boroughs, 1,041 new cafés, takeaways, restaurants, pubs and mobile caterers appear on the public food-hygiene register. Each one is a real premises getting ready to trade, most of them independents you've never heard of yet.

1,041
new food businesses
registered across the ten Greater Manchester boroughs
18%
are limited companies
190 of 1,041. The rest are sole traders and partnerships
118
companies barely a year old
incorporated in the 12 months before this snapshot
511
Restaurant / cafés lead
the biggest FSA category: restaurants, cafés and canteens combined

Where they're opening

The city of Manchester dominates in raw numbers, but new food businesses are appearing in every borough, from Tameside to Manchester.

New food businesses by borough

Manchester484
Stockport128
Bury70
Wigan69
Rochdale65
Oldham60
Salford51
Trafford49
Bolton44
Tameside21
One postcode district, M12 (Ardwick, Longsight & Gorton), accounts for 86 new food businesses on its own. 86% of them are takeaways.
The single busiest cluster of new food-business registrations in Greater Manchester.

What's opening

Half of everything new is a restaurant or café. But more than a third is takeaways and sandwich shops, and that share swings hard by area.

New businesses by type

Restaurant / café511
Takeaway / sandwich412
Pub / bar / club72
Mobile caterer44
Hotel / B&B2

Takeaway share of new openings, by borough

Bury64%
Tameside57%
Bolton52%
Salford45%
Rochdale45%
Stockport44%
Oldham40%
Manchester34%
Trafford31%
Wigan28%

Bury is the takeaway capital: 64% of its new food businesses are takeaways. Wigan skews most towards sit-down venues, at just 28%.

One in six is a real company

Of the 1,041 new businesses, 18% (190) are registered limited companies, not just sole traders. And of those, 118 were incorporated in the twelve months before this snapshot. These aren't dormant shells: they're new premises, newly incorporated, getting ready to open their doors.

That matters to anyone who sells to hospitality. A brand-new limited company opening a food venue needs a card machine, an EPOS till, insurance, an accountant, equipment, signage. And it needs them in the first few weeks, before it has picked a supplier for any of them.

See it for yourself

Explore all 1,041 on the live interactive map, or get your borough's new openings delivered every Monday, the week they register.

Get your first pack free → Explore the live map
Method & sources. Figures are drawn from the Food Standards Agency food-hygiene register (new registrations across the ten Greater Manchester councils) matched to Companies House, as at the most recent snapshot. Neighbourhood labels for postcode districts are indicative. "Barely a year old" counts companies incorporated in the twelve months before the snapshot date. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. No personal data is included. Published by OpenedThisWeek · Privacy.