Restaurant Growth Potential Modeling & Strategic Classification System - 01

The hospitality sector's post-pandemic recovery has intensified competitive pressures across food-service markets, making expansion strategy a mission-critical capability for operators. This paper presents a comprehensive, data-science-driven framework for assessing the growth readiness of 1,696 restaurant branches operated under the SkyCity Auckland portfolio.Using a 30-dimensional operational dataset encompassing financial, logistical, demand, and channel metrics, the study designs and validates a multi-stage analytical pipeline: exploratory data analysis, high-dimensional feature engineering, Principal Component Analysis (PCA) for latent-structure discovery, unsupervised clustering (K-Means, Agglomerative Hierarchical, and DBSCAN) for archetype identification, and a composite Growth Potential Index (GPI) for individual restaurant scoring.