Restaurant Pad available located across the parking lot of the Hilton Garden Inn
Fontana, CA.
38,000 sf. parcel with a restaurant pad of up to
6,000 sf.

Back to Fontana Description

Fontana’s Hidden Market for Casual Dining Restaurants

The area surrounding Kaiser Permanente’s expanded Fontana Medical Center and offices provides a largely untapped casual dining market— with the high vehicle traffic, commercial space, and growing residential to feed a restaurant’s success.

The recipe for success in locating a casual dining establishment is no secret. Regardless of how well known or popular a national or regional chain may be, the success of any new franchise relies as much on the quality of the location as it does on the quality of the food put on the table. Restaurant operators and brokers look for highly visible locations with an abundance of vehicle traffic, a large number of employees working in the area to drive both lunch and dinner traffic, and ample residential development within the reasonable vicinity. That is what makes the restaurant opportunity at the southeast corner of Sierra and Slover Avenues, just off the busy I-10 in Fontana, so appealing.

Impressive Traffic Numbers

The first consideration for any franchisee is vehicle traffic. Unless people drive by a location and see the restaurant, they are unlikely to go out of their way to dine there. From that standpoint, the Sierra and Slover Avenue location in Fontana is ideal. According to the most recent CalTrans survey, 216,000 vehicles per day travel on I-10 at the Sierra Avenue off-ramp. The proposed restaurant site at Sierra and Slover is just one block off the I-10, ensuring that any restaurant operator will enjoy significant traffic. In addition, the City of Fontana has approved “permanent” freeway signage on the I-10, so a restaurant could place a sign in a highly visible location to drive additional business from the freeway to the site.

Exceptional Workday Environment

Most casual dining restaurants rely on both lunch and dinner business to meet revenue objectives. The Sierra and Slover Avenue restaurant location will put an operator in the middle of an exceptional workday environment. The restaurant will be located in close proximity (3 to 4 blocks) to Kaiser Permanente’s newly expanded Fontana Medical Center, designed to provide high-quality health care to members throughout the central Inland Empire area. The hospital has more than 5,800 employees who are on-premise daily. In addition, Kaiser Permanente has recently opened professional offices with approximately 1,200 employees in the Palm Court shopping center that’s literally across the street from the proposed restaurant site. Kaiser’s space will not only include a call center filled with employees, but will also support the hospital’s health education offices, pharmacy services, and other similar departments that will attract the general public in large numbers.

The hospital receives approximately 5 million visitors per year. That works out to nearly 13,700 people daily—Monday through Sunday, year-round—passing the proposed restaurant location to visit a relative or loved one. These visitors will need a convenient place to eat. That place could be your restaurant, or if you are a broker, your client’s restaurant. Target and Mervyn’s, two large, high-volume, nationwide retailers anchor the major 650,000-square foot shopping center across Sierra Avenue from the restaurant site. These retailers and a number of other merchants in the center employ hundreds of people and serve hundreds of thousands of customers who will be looking for somewhere close by to eat lunch or dinner.

Also driving traffic to the site is the restaurant’s neighbor on the parcel, a 115-room Hilton Garden Inn—including a 2,300 square foot conference facility—that will open in late 2008. Plans are in place as well for a Holiday Inn Express that will be built in a small shopping and commercial center nearby. Both hotels will serve many guests who are likely to dine at the proposed restaurant. And the small shopping and commercial complex will provide more employees who will increase the lunch and dinner crowd. Finally, the restaurant will be one of the closest casual dining establishments to the California Speedway, the largest dedicated “super” speedway in California—home to many Indy-type and NASCAR events, bringing hundreds of thousands of fans into the area annually.

Appetizing Residential Numbers

At first glance, a prospective restaurant owner new to the area might be struck by the numerous modern distribution facilities nearby. But a closer examination reveals that the existing residential numbers within 0–3 miles—when viewed on a per-restaurant basis—are quite appetizing for opening a new casual dining restaurant in Fontana, even without considering planned future residential development. For example, comparing today’s population estimates within a three-mile radius in Fontana and in the desirable Ontario/Etiwanda (including Rancho Cucamonga) area 10 to 12 miles up the I-10 freeway, one finds Fontana has a total population of 125,555, while Ontario/Etiwanda has 154,131 people. However, Ontario/Etiwanda currently has 27 casual dining establishments serving those residents, for a total of 5,709 people per restaurant. In Fontana, there are currently only 2 casual dining restaurants. So, the opening of the proposed third casual dining restaurant would result in an average of 41,852 people per restaurant in Fontana. That’s 733% more!

In both areas, one finds a relatively large Hispanic mix. In Fontana, only 32,770 are non-Hispanic, while in Ontario/Etiwanda 94,636 are non-Hispanic. Still, breaking the numbers down on a non-Hispanic basis per restaurant in the two areas, the data shows Ontario/Etiwanda has 3,505 non-Hispanics per restaurant, while Fontana more than triples that number with 10,923 non-Hispanics per restaurant. But let’s take a little closer look at the under-served Hispanics in that area. A recent study for ADVO shows that large Hispanic populations actually provide a plus for a potential restaurant owner. The study found that Hispanics spend 20% more per week on restaurant dining than non-Hispanic consumers. This is particularly true of highly acculturated Hispanics—making the Fontana site a high-potential market to reach.

Clearly, Fontana’s population—both non-Hispanic and Hispanic—is more than adequate to support a new casual dining franchise. And the residential population is growing quickly, with several large new home developments expected to be completed within the next three years, and the population within one-mile and ten-mile radiuses projected to reach more than 329,000 and 1,000,000, respectively, by 2010.

Discovering the Hidden Market

This, then, represents a hidden market in Fontana—one that upon close analysis does appear to have a substantial non-Hispanic market to draw from on a per-restaurant basis, in addition to a large, attractive Hispanic population. Additional demand generators include the thousands of employees who work for Kaiser Permanente, customers and employees of the retailers in the Palm Court shopping center, guests and employees at the Hilton Garden Inn and the proposed Holiday Inn Express as well as adjacent retail and commercial space, racing fans drawn to the California Speedway a few miles away, and the highly visible location near a very busy exit on I-10—the major freeway bisecting the Inland Empire. The restaurant site is well positioned to offer a restaurant owner and operator access to all of these potential advantages:

Back to Fontana Description

For further information about this outstanding restaurant opportunity, contact Buddy Parsons, president of Borelli Investment Company. Telephone (408) 453-4700 or e-mail buddy@borelli.com.