DATA & INSIGHTS
Higher prices and more locations drove chain restaurant sales last year Technomic Top 500: Chain restaurants continued to record strong growth last year, but mostly without higher traffic. And there were wide variations in performance throughout the ranking. C hain restaurants con- tinued to grow at a healthy pace in 2023, according to the 2024 By Jonathan Maze Editor-in-Chief Restaurant Business
and now represent 44% of all Top 500 sales, up from 42% in 2019. The very largest chains have more resources to spend on ad- vertising, technology and remod- els that have helped them open some distance between them and the remaining chains. McDonald’s, as it has every year since the ranking’s incep- tion, remains the country’s larg- est restaurant chain by sales, with system sales last year of
sales growth, as average restau- rant prices increased 7.1% last year. The combined increase in prices and unit count suggests that consumers either visited chain restaurants less often or ordered lower-priced options or some combination of both. Sales were somewhat top heavy, as the 10 largest restau- rant chains grew at a faster rate than the rest of the Top 500. The Top 10 chains grew 9.1% last year
Technomic Top 500 ranking of the country’s largest restaurant brands by sales. Total sales for the 500 chains increased $31 billion, or 7.8%, to $424 billion, continuing a three- year run of strong sales growth. “It was a very, very strong growth year for our Top 500,” Technomic managing principal Joe Pawlak said at this year’s Restaurant Leadership Confer- ence. But that sales growth came from two sources: Higher prices and more units. Top 500 chains added more than 4,000 net new locations, or 1.8% growth. That’s the fast- est rate of unit count growth in seven years. Top 500 chains now operate 233,490 locations, or nearly 6,000 locations more than in 2019, before the pandemic led to thousands of closures. Price increases also fueled
Sales among restaurant chains in the Technomic Top 500 Chain Restaurant Report grew 7.8% last year and an average of 6% since 2019. Limited-service restaurants led the charge in 2023. Top 500 Sales by Sector
Restaurant Leadership Conference 2024 12
PHOTO CREDIT: W. SCOTT MITCHELL PHOTOGRAPHY
Powered by FlippingBook