The post-pandemic restaurant environment has not been easy on most companies, and we have the data to prove it.
Total restaurant industry sales since 2021 have grown 23.5% since 2021, according to a Restaurant Business analysis of Technomic Top 1,500 data. That did not keep up with inflation, amounting to a real dollar decline of about 4%.
What’s more, unit count increased 6.4% over that period and the U.S. population grew 2.9%. The average restaurant chain was able to expand with a combination of more locations and higher prices, but not more visits from customers. And the typical American visited a restaurant chain less often in 2025 than they did in 2021.
Sales at more than 60% of U.S. restaurant chains were not able to keep pace with inflation, pointing to a restaurant industry that is every bit as bifurcated as the consumer it serves. Some consumers are spending. Others are not. And the more limited visits are going to a select group of restaurant chains.
Winners over the past five years include beverages, chicken, and Asian concepts. Losers include the bulk of the full-service industry and anything that serves pizza.
We analyzed data from the Technomic Top 1,500 restaurant chains over the five years following the pandemic with the help of AI, double-checking calculations to ensure accuracy. We then measured sales against cumulative growth in food-away-from-home prices.
The results will come as no surprise to anybody who has followed the post-pandemic environment.
Higher menu prices, brought on by rising labor, food, and other costs at restaurants, means the average U.S. consumer is unable to afford as many restaurant visits as they’ve made in the past. But because people with higher incomes are spending freely, many restaurant chains are performing perfectly fine.
And changes in consumer behavior have led to broad shifts in the restaurants people are visiting. They’re consuming more Asian food and less pizza, more drinks and snacks and fewer full meals.
Even the growth illustrates some of these issues.
By far the biggest source of restaurant industry growth over the past five years has been the fast-casual sector. In 2021, such chains accounted for just over 15% of chain sales. By 2025, fast-casual chains accounted for 17.4% of chain sales. Yet they didn’t just take those sales from casual-dining brands.
The share of Top 1,500 sales going to quick-service chains declined 1.37 percentage points over that period, to 61.22%.
While fast-food chains remain the most dominant restaurant brands, they are increasingly losing business to brands with higher price points and stronger reputations for quality.
Higher-income consumers are still spending and are more likely to blow off fast-casual chains’ higher prices.
But there also may be a sense that, as prices at fast-food chains increase, it may be simply worth it to visit the higher-quality brand. Inflation has, in other words, created a “trading up” scenario that has not been there in the past.
As for specific menu types, beverages have been by far the biggest winner of the post-pandemic period.
Fast-casual coffee and fast-casual beverages have both generated the strongest growth since 2021, as both sectors more than doubled sales. Three of the five strongest sectors feature beverages, and quick-service coffee chains have also easily outpaced inflation despite weakness at the largest such chain, Starbucks.
The coffee chain 7 Brew has gone from basically nothing in 2020 to the fourth largest coffee chain in 2025, while brands like Dutch Bros, Scooters and several others have taken off. Other beverage chains, such as the drive-thru dirty soda chain Swig, have thrived coming out of the pandemic.
Beverages have been a major area of industry growth, with sales continuously outpacing unit count growth, suggesting more organic demand from consumers. That has prompted aggressive development of new beverage products by major chains like McDonald’s, Taco Bell, KFC, and Chick-fil-A, all in a bid to capture more occasions.
Arguably the biggest loser among industry sectors over the past five years has been pizza.
Three the five industry subsectors that have lost the most market share over the past five years feature pizza.
Fast-casual pizza and fine-dining Italian and pizza sales have both declined on an absolute basis, though both sectors are relatively small. Fast-casual pizza, which at one point promised to inject the menu item with a creative energy, has largely collapsed.
But quick-service pizza is largely stuck in neutral. The sector’s sales have risen just 5.78% since 2021, or a 23% decline when adjusted for menu price inflation. Three of the five largest such pizza chains lost sales last year. Two (Papa Johns and Pizza Hut) are shuttering units. A third (Domino’s) just made its second post-pandemic CEO change.
The widespread availability of pizza, combined with the advent of third-party delivery and weakness among low-income consumers, might be conspiring to create problems for most chains in that business.
Quick-service sandwich chains have also declined, thanks largely to weakness among the biggest brands in that sector, Subway (down 4.5% since 2021) and Arby’s (down 5%). Subway since 2015 has closed more locations than any other restaurant chain in history.
Many of the weakest brands and weakest sectors serve large numbers of lower-income consumers or are fully saturated, and so they are losing share to upstart chains or sectors resonating with more free-spending diners.
The overarching lesson in all this is relatively simple: The U.S. economy is in a low-growth mode, with a few winners and a lot of losers. The U.S. chain restaurant industry, which is fully saturated, is simply following along.