Hardee's
U.S. Location Dataset // 1,479
Hardee's, the Southeast- and Midwest-anchored QSR brand owned by CKE Restaurants (alongside its Western sibling Carl's Jr.), maintains a deliberately regional footprint of 1,479 U.S. locations that skews heavily toward rural counties and small metro areas — a distribution pattern almost inverse to McDonald's urban-suburban concentration. CKE's dual-brand geographic partition means Hardee's essentially operates as the eastern half of a national burger system, with virtually no overlap with Carl's Jr. west of the Rockies, making this dataset a clean proxy for CKE's eastern franchise network. The brand's franchise-heavy model (over 90% of units are franchisee-operated) creates a fragmented ownership landscape that is particularly valuable for food-service distributors mapping delivery routes, QSR franchise brokers identifying resale or multi-unit acquisition targets, and CPG field teams prioritizing DSD stops for breakfast-daypart products like biscuit mixes or premium coffee.
●Coverage Map
Hardee's dealer locations in the USA
1,479 locations · Source: LocationLists.com
☆Who uses this data
Sales & Business Development
Territory planning, lead generation, and prospecting for teams selling products or services to stores
Market Research & Competitive Intelligence
Analyzing Hardee's's geographic footprint, density, and overlap with competitors
Logistics & Supply Chain
Route optimization, delivery planning, and distribution network analysis across 1,479 locations
Real Estate & Site Selection
Co-tenancy analysis, trade area studies, and identifying expansion opportunities near existing stores
✓Data quality & methodology
This dataset is compiled directly from Hardee's's official store locator system. We query the same data source that powers the “Find a store” page on their website, ensuring the data matches what the brand itself publishes.
Weekly
Refresh frequency
Deduplicated
By name + address + city
Validated
Format checks on all fields
Every record goes through automated quality checks including ZIP code format validation, coordinate bounds verification (US only), phone number standardization, and duplicate detection. Records that fail validation are flagged and excluded from the dataset.
{}Data Fields
≡Sample Data Preview
| name | address | city | state | zip | country | phone | latitude |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hardee's 1505548 | 11024 Us Highway 431 | Albertville | AL | 35950 | US | 2568783777 | 34.29803 |
| Hardee's 1505826 | 907 Lawrence Dr | Burlington | IA | 52601 | US | 3197524029 | 40.79948 |
| Hardee's 1505334 | 2403 N Salisbury Blvd | Salisbury | MD | 21801 | US | 4103417183 | 38.40263 |
| Hardee's 1504362 | 2255 Jefferson Davis Hwy | Sanford | NC | 27330 | US | 9197741942 | 35.43776 |
| Hardee's 1506677 | 4315 RUTLEDGE PIKE | KNOXVILLE | TN | 37914 | US | 8659097737 | 36.00533 |
Hardee's Locations
1,479 locations · CSV · Updated weekly
?Frequently Asked Questions
How does Hardee's geographic footprint compare to Carl's Jr., and can I use this data to map CKE's total national coverage?
Hardee's 1,479 locations are concentrated east of the Mississippi — particularly in North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, and Alabama — while Carl's Jr.'s roughly 1,000 units cluster in California, Texas, and the Mountain West. Combined, CKE covers most of the continental U.S. with minimal brand overlap. If you need a merged CKE master file or an overlap analysis in border states like Oklahoma and Missouri where both brands coexist, LocationLists can build that as a custom deliverable.
I'm a broadline food-service distributor trying to optimize delivery routes to independent QSR operators in the Southeast. How useful is this dataset for that?
Extremely useful as a density anchor. Hardee's 1,479 locations — most of which sit on rural highways and in small towns under 50,000 population — form a skeleton map of where independent QSR traffic exists in the Southeast and Midwest. By plotting these alongside your existing stop list, you can identify clusters where adding nearby independent operators would reduce per-stop delivery cost. LocationLists can also run a proximity analysis against other QSR datasets in the catalog to quantify route overlap.
What does Hardee's rural skew mean for site-selection analysts evaluating competing QSR concepts?
Hardee's over-indexes in counties with populations below 25,000 — markets where it often serves as the primary branded breakfast option. This makes the dataset a useful negative-space tool: if you're siting a new Bojangles' or Zaxby's, Hardee's presence signals existing QSR demand in a small trade area, while its absence may indicate a market too thin to support a drive-through concept. The latitude/longitude fields in this dataset allow direct import into GIS platforms like Esri or Placer.ai for trade-area scoring.
I'm a franchise broker looking for multi-unit Hardee's operators who might be acquisition targets. Does this data help identify multi-unit clusters?
The dataset includes each unit's unique store ID (visible in the name field, e.g., 'Hardee's 1505548'), which you can cross-reference against state franchise disclosure records to group locations by franchisee. Clusters of 5–15 units within a single DMA often signal a mid-size operator — the sweet spot for roll-up acquisition. If you need us to enrich the file with estimated franchisee groupings or DMA-level unit counts, that's a custom project we handle regularly.
How does Hardee's location density compare to other QSR breakfast competitors like Waffle House or Bojangles'?
Hardee's 1,479 units give it roughly 75% of Waffle House's footprint and about double Bojangles' unit count, but with a wider geographic spread across the Midwest that neither competitor matches. The strategic insight is that Hardee's is the only national-scale biscuit-breakfast QSR brand with meaningful presence in states like Illinois, Indiana, and Missouri — markets where Waffle House and Bojangles' have little to no penetration. LocationLists can produce a custom overlap report between any two of these brands at the ZIP or county level.
Can I use this dataset to analyze Hardee's proximity to major retail traffic generators like Walmart or Dollar General?
Yes — combining this dataset with a Walmart or Dollar General location file lets you measure co-location patterns that reveal Hardee's site-selection logic. Historically, Hardee's franchisees have favored highway-adjacent pads near big-box anchors in rural markets. The geo-coordinates in this file support distance-matrix calculations in any GIS tool, and LocationLists can run a pre-built proximity analysis that flags every Hardee's within a specified radius of your chosen retail brand.