Restaurant Recovery Will Depend On Consumers Returning to Work, School
One category doing well is people looking for afternoon snacks.
Restaurant traffic continues to reflect changing consumer preferences as the pandemic evolves, with the “PM snack” category standing out as the only daypart that showed increased year-over-year visits.
Food and beverage operators divide each day into “dayparts”—typically categorized as the morning meal, lunch, dinner, and PM snack. And the latter, which benefited from flexible schedules as a general reluctance among consumers to dine in during the height of the pandemic, is posting solid increases, with visits up 8% compared to May 2019, according to a new analysis from NPD Group.
“Since this daypart has increased traffic during the pandemic, operators will need to innovate their food and beverage offerings to grow traffic,” NPD experts said in a report discussing the findings.
“Across dayparts, the motivations for visiting restaurants are evolving, necessitating a refocus on how restaurant operators target consumers,” said David Portalatin, NPD food industry advisor and author of Eating Patterns in America. “Quality, value, and innovation will always be relevant to the consumer, but we also need to recognize that in many ways the world has fundamentally changed.”
The restaurant industry lost as much as 35% of visits at the beginning of COVID-19, but has shown what NPD Group experts call “remarkable resiliency” nonetheless. While total restaurant visits are still down 6% over May 2019 levels, they are up 23% from a year ago—and NPP says the key to the industry’s recovery will be the strength of each daypart.
Morning meal visits, including both online and physical visits, were still down 5% over May 2020 levels and are down 11% over May 2019 numbers. Lunch traffic is down 4% over May 2020 and 10% over two years ago; analysts agree that recovery for each of these dayparts will depend on consumers returning to work and school.
Visits at the dinner daypart were down -5% over 2020 levels and -12% from May 2019.
“The ability for restaurants, particularly full service restaurants, to operate at total capacity, consumer comfort with dining in, and more business and recreational travel will aid recovery at the dinner daypart,” NPD analysts noted in the report.