Restaurants Gaining As Students, Office Workers Return

Restaurant traffic is starting to improve as students and office workers return with the Covid-19 recovery, the NPD Group is reporting.

Breakfast online and physical traffic was at the same level this year during the September through November period as it was in 2019, with an 11% increase for that meal in those months this year compared to a 10% decline in the same period a year ago.

Lunch from online and physical visits is up by 4% but still 7% below pre-pandemic levels, the research firm says.

On-premises has also risen, but has a ways to go in both breakfast and lunch to get back to the business lost during the pandemic

Breakfast for on-premises dining has recovered sharply with a 51% September to November gain after a 55% fall-off for those months in 2020.

Eating in restaurants for lunch rose 44% against a 60% drop for September to November in 2020.

For morning snacks, online and physical visits were up 6% in those three months this year compared to a 7% decline last year and down 1% for the same period in 2019. On-premises dining visits during this part of the day rose by 51% compared to the reported period last year when on-premises traffic declined by 48%.

“The increased mobility this fall contributed to year-over-year gains at key restaurant dayparts, although visits are not fully back to pre-pandemic levels,” says David Portalatin, NPD food industry advisor and author of Eating Patterns in America. “We’re in a steady-state for the next several months, perhaps with a bump up or down here and there, but we expect to lag pre-pandemic traffic levels through 2022 slightly.”

Improvements in breakfast and lunch business helped quick service restaurants recover almost back to 2019 levels in October, Placer.ai reported earlier this month.

For the chains trying to recover from a pandemic drop-off in business there was not a “one size fits all” solution, according to the firm.

McDonald’s appears to have closed its visit gap by consolidating its position as lunch and dinner provider, Placer.ai noted, while Wendy’s appears to have taken the pandemic as an opportunity to carve out a new niche for itself as a breakfast leader

McDonald’s relatively small drop in lunch visits from 31.9% of total visits in Q3 2019 to 29.1% of total visits in Q3 2021 indicates that the QSR king has remained the dominant QSR brand in the United States, the research firm said.