The State of the Restaurant Industry (Infographic)

As the foodservice industry continues to grow, restaurants will face new challenges and how they handle those challenges will determine whether they sink or swim.

The first step in addressing these challenges is understanding the state of the restaurant industry today. This infographic will walk you through how quick-service, fast casual, and casual dining restaurants fared in 2017. Despite industry growth, the top 500 chain brands experienced a drop in sales growth again. This downward trend points to the challenges that big brands face today:

1. Consumers show a growing preference for eating at home and consuming healthier dining options, so restaurant brands are faced with delivery challenges and the bigger question of how to compete with new restaurant food alternatives, such as off-premise dining, meal-delivery services and food service venues.
2. At the same time, hiring and retaining employees remains a constant struggle, especially while the labor market is tight and turnover rates over 100% prevail across the industry.
3. All of these problems are occurring while brands attempt to jump on the limited-time offer (LTO) bandwagon. Consumers love LTOs and will turn out in droves for them, which is a tempting proposition restaurants. However, they face significant uphill battles with executing LTOs successfully.

Here is what 2017 looked like for the restaurant industry, the top three challenges they are facing in 2018, and what they can do to conquer them.