Coverage

We continue to look for the U.S. restaurant industry to win back additional market share over the next 12-18 months. Indeed, it’s looking much more likely that it’s just a matter of time that the market share for restaurants (versus grocery stores) will exceed the pre-pandemic market share it had of Americans’ food & beverage dollars. In addition, keep in mind that large restaurant concepts — and larger concepts tend to be the publicly-traded ones

With this report, we update our data-driven Kalinowski Family Dining Index for Q3E to +42.0%. This is the one-year figure, lapping the -28.4% number from Q3 2020. On a two-year basis, the Kalinowski Family Dining Index for Q3E is at +1.7%. (These numbers are based on our latest proprietary checks/data as regards same-store sales performance for this segment during July, August, and early September.) At this point, we anticipate that the +1.7% figure will be

August 2021 was the fifth full month in the U.S. to lap a year-ago month that was affected by the pandemic and related issues. How is average check changing in the U.S. quick-service and fast-casual segments given these recent dynamics? Our bottom line: average check is holding in better than expected for fast-casual and quick-service (and particularly so for the quick-service burger segment). To the extent two-year trends in average check don’t deteriorate all that

Earlier today (Thursday, September 9th), we learned that the BlackBox Index of same-store sales for August 2021 — importantly, these data points are on a two-year basis — was up by +6.1%, with two-year traffic off by -5.4%. The +6.1% figure — while clearly still in positive territory — nevertheless was below both June 2021’s +6.6% number and August 2021’s +8.1% showing. Since the August 2020 BlackBox Index was down by -12.3%, the two-year figure