Restaurants After the Pandemic: Tracking US Food Industry Recovery

With customers across every foodservice category in every US state, we began tracking restaurant sales trends across the US at the onset of the pandemic in 2020. This post provides a look back at that data and how the industry began rising toward recovery. 

US Restaurant Sales by Week (3/1/20 – 11/22/20)

• To determine the pre-COVID-19 benchmark, we calculated restaurant sales as a percentage of spend that occurred the week of March 1, 2020.
• The colored bar charts represent the different restaurant industry segments and the blue line tracks total sales compared to the pre-COVID-19 period.
• Across all segments, restaurant chain and foodservice industry sales for the week of November 16-22, 2020 were at 80% of pre-COVID-19 levels.
  
  

QSR: 99% (-1%)

Fast Casual: 98% (+5%)

Full-Service Dining: 67% (-5%)

Entertainment Venues: 32% (-1%)

Airport/Travel Concessions: 32% (-2%)

Top 30 States: Week-Over-Week Performance (3/1/20 – 11/22/20)

About the Data:

This data from 2020 shows weekly foodservice sales at chain restaurants in the United States on the Crunchtime operations management platform across the following segments: Airport Concessions, Entertainment Venues, Fast Casual, Full-Service Dining, and Quick Service.

Sales data includes: credit cards, cash, online orders, take-out, and delivery (all store sales collected from a POS).

Independent (non-chain) restaurants are not included in this sample. Only states with a statistically significant number of locations across each segment were used for this data analysis.

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