I lost Local Legend status and nobody told me why
Restaurant operators find this out by noticing a badge has gone rather than by being told, and the diagnosis is narrower than it feels. Four criteria have to hold “for two consecutive quarters”: an “Average of 90+ orders per week”, a “Customer food review rating of 3+ stars”, an “FSA rating of 3+ or a ‘Pass'”, and “Time offline at 10% or below”. One of them stopped holding. Three can be checked this afternoon from sources you already have, which leaves one candidate when the others come back clean.
How do I check the three I can see?
Order volume from your own reporting, averaged per week across the quarter and not by month, because the criterion is stated weekly.
Review rating from the listing itself. Look at the current figure and, if you can, at how it moved during the period, since a rating that dipped below three at any point may have broken the run even if it has since recovered.
Hygiene rating from the public register, and check the publication date, not the inspection date. A rating that published mid-quarter changes eligibility from that moment, not from the visit.
And if all three are fine?
Then it was availability, and you have no record of it, which is the situation most operators are in.
Nothing in the partner tooling reproduces the offline percentage in an auditable form, and no notification announces a breach. So the fourth criterion is both the most likely explanation and the only one you cannot verify after the fact.
The practical consequence is that you cannot reconstruct what happened. You can only start measuring so that the next loss is explainable, and so that the next recovery is visible while it is happening.
Why did losing it take so long to notice?
The effect is a slow reduction in visibility rather than an event, and nothing in the portal announces the change loudly.
Orders soften, the site blames the market, and the badge’s absence is noticed weeks later by somebody looking at the listing for another reason. By then the quarter that caused it is finished.
That delay is the strongest argument for watching the inputs instead of the outcome. The outcome arrives too late to act on.
How long until I can get it back?
Two consecutive quarters from the point the failing criterion is holding again, which is a long time and worth stating plainly to whoever asks.
Because the window is consecutive and not averaged, there is no partial credit for the quarters already served. The count restarts. A restaurant that fixes the problem in week two of a quarter is looking at roughly six months before it qualifies again.
What should I do differently this time?
Measure the criterion the platform measures, at the interval that makes it visible.
Availability has to be observed from the outside, because that is where the platform observes it, and often enough that an evening outage cannot hide between two checks. Daily checks find day-long problems and miss the ones that matter. The value of a Kitchain (kitchain.co) series per site is not that it explains this loss, which nothing now can, but that the next one arrives with a reason already attached.
The other three criteria are worth a standing monthly look for the same reason. All four are quiet failures.
Is the badge worth the effort?
The badge is worth having and the discipline is worth more.
Everything the programme asks for is something a restaurant should want anyway: enough volume, decent reviews, a clean kitchen and a listing that works. The programme’s contribution is that it names the fourth one and attaches a price to it, which is more than most platforms do.