The watch exists because the City of Chicago publishes liquor application notices that are useful to vendors — but in a format that costs sales teams an hour a day to read. We do that hour, and ship the result before they get to their desk.
The watch reads from two City of Chicago sources, both public:
Ownership records come from the per-account ownership notice page that the City links from each filing.
For every filing on the BACP page we collect the account number, business name, address, application type, and payment date. Multiple rows for the same account on the same payment date collapse into one venue record. We attach the ownership listing for that account, and compare the venue against the active-license dataset by account, normalized address, and normalized brand name.
From those checks we apply a classification: Likely new location, Existing location application, Existing location expansion, Special license watch, or Application watch. Each classification has a written reason that travels with the row.
We don't scrape press releases, we don't enrich rows with personal phone numbers, and we don't add anything the City didn't publish. If a record is wrong, the City record it points to is the one to verify against — and we'll fix the row.
Questions, feature requests, or coverage suggestions: [email protected].
Latest report: April 20, 2026. Window: Mar 10, 2026 — Apr 17, 2026.