Mar 27, 2025
Introducing Board Foresight & Signals
11:00 AM EDT, English
Register for the webinar Whataburger Restaurants
Whataburger uses Board Foresight for more impactful predictive modeling and forecasting
Quantifying future sales specific to a demographic market to support and improve internal forecasting
Whataburger is a fast-food restaurant with over 1,100 U.S. locations. This rapidly growing company faced challenges around accurate sales forecasting and staffing projections. In response, it implemented Board Foresight to enhance wage planning and support franchisees. Now, Whataburger leverages macroeconomic insights for more accurate predictive modeling and impactful forecasting.
- Industry: Restaurant Services & Chains
- Department: All
- Revenue: $4.7B (USD)
- Restaurants: 1,100
Whataburger is a fast-food restaurant chain with over 1,100 locations across the United States. Founded in Texas, the company has been in business for 75 years and is represented by a combination of corporate-owned and franchised restaurants. Whataburger generates nearly $5 billion annually in revenue from restaurants and retail products sold in grocery stores throughout the U.S.
Whataburger’s challenge
The organization faced two primary challenges. The first was inaccurate sales forecasts, primarily because its internal process relied heavily on historical data from stores and franchisees, which had gaps. Whataburger wanted better financial forecasting insights to address this issue. The second challenge, common across various industries, was projecting wages and staffing for corporate restaurants and providing support to franchisee holders.
The Solution
Board economists partnered with Whataburger’s finance team to understand sales outlooks specific to demographic market areas, with the intent of using this information to optimize their internally generated forecasts. The team has created 20 short-term (1-12 month) predictive models, for topline sales and sales by region/territory.
The outcome
Board Foresight provides Whataburger an unbiased lens into all macroeconomic forces, highlighting those with the highest correlation—along with quantification of the lead time—to support in more impactful predictive modeling and forecasting.
- Whataburger is now able to quantify future sales specific to a demographic market area to support and improve internal forecasting
- The HR team now has greater HCM-related insights to managing expenses, costs, and retention
- Predictive models were generated for each of the restaurant chain’s defined market areas, and those models helped the finance team forecast store sales within a 1-2% error margin
- Board Foresight now enables more accurate and better-quality decision-making for budgeting and planning
