Restaurants Industry: Restaurants Weekly: Divergence, dispersion and dislocation

Research evidence excerpt

Restaurants Industry: Restaurants Weekly: Divergence, dispersion and dislocation

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Restaurants Industry

Restaurants Weekly: Divergence,

dispersion and dislocation

Price Objective Change

Consumer claw back 16 May 2026 Corrected

The challenge with covering the restaurant industry – besides the occupational hazard of Equity

walking away starving from every earnings call – is understanding industry dynamics United States

without having line of site into the trends at the exceptionally long tail of small Restaurants

operators. The Census Bureau’s retail sales estimates show Foodservice and Drinking Sara Senatore

places sales growing 2.7% y/y in April, virtually unchanged from March’s 2.5% y/y Research Analyst

growth. The data are largely consistent with Blackbox’s reported industry same-stores BofAS+1 646 743 2110

sales-growth of 1.4% (vs 1.5% in March). But Second Measure data diverge sharply: y/y sara.senatore@bofa.com

sales growth at the median restaurant slowed from -3.7% in March to -4.3% in April. Isiah Austin

The data suggest that for now, smaller operators continue to claw back the market share Research Analyst BofAS

lost during COVID and the years immediately after. +1 646 855 0472

isiah.austin@bofa.com

Gapping out

With aggregate industry growth still subdued and independents resurgent, dispersion

Stock symbol key:persists across and within industry segments. The dispersion was apparent on 1Q

BROS: Dutch Brosearnings calls when restaurants were fairly evenly split between those who said that

BLMN: Bloomin Brandsrising gas prices have had no impact and those who have reported a headwind, though

CAKE: The Cheesecake Factorythe latter group continues to overindex to lower income consumers. At the segment