Restaurant executives and operators were optimistic about the outlook for 2025 late last year. And there were at least some signs of improvement.
And then the calendar turned. “Industry headwinds” and “challenging environment” have resumed their prominent place in executives’ prepared remarks on at least some earnings calls. Weather events, unsurprisingly, have also created challenges.
But not everybody is seeing the same thing. Some are doing just fine. Here’s a sampling of what restaurant industry executives have said about the start of 2025 on recent earnings calls. Many of these comments were sourced using transcripts from the financial services site AlphaSense.
McDonald’s signaled a challenge earlier this month. “The overall market remains pretty muted,” CEO Chris Kempczinski said.
The company said that low-income consumers were a problem last year, with traffic from that group down in the double digits.
And executives suggested it isn’t much better so far this year. “The industry certainly has had a sluggish start,” CFO Ian Borden said, “partly due to that low-income consumer.”
Count Wendy’s among those with challenges. “We’ve started the year facing some overall industry traffic headwinds, exacerbated by significant weather events across the country,” CFO Kenneth Cook told analysts.
But Wendy’s expects this to be temporary, much like its competitor McDonald’s. “We do expect Q1 to be the trough as we move throughout the year,” Cook said. He said that improvement would be “driven both by improvements in industry traffic and our exciting programming to drive winning in the market.”
Consumer anxiety. Wingstop’s same-store sales rose 10% and few chains performed as well as the chicken concept did last year. And yet the Dallas-based chain nevertheless saw some of the same consumer issues as other chains did.
“As it was widely reported in January, you saw an elevated increase in the consumer’s anxiety about the future,” CEO Michael Skipworth said.
Weather problems persist. Nothing hurts restaurant sales quite like bad weather and January and February were full of it. Several chains mentioned it. Snowstorms and cold hit much of the South—where a lot of restaurant development is now taking place—while fires hammered Los Angeles.
All of that was bad for plenty of chains, including Chipotle. “If you look at January from a transactions comp standpoint, we ran about negative 2% and that included a pretty sizable impact from weather,” CFO Adam Rymer said. A “calendar shift” also played a role, thanks to a mid-week New Year’s Day. He suggested that the impact of weather and Los Angeles fires had a 400-basis-point impact on sales in the quarter.
But not everybody is having issues. Dutch Bros had a strong fourth quarter, at least based on investor expectations. And it seemed to suggest things were perfectly fine so far in 2025. “We saw strength in January as well,” CEO Christine Barone said. “We’re pleased with how we’re starting the year.”
Cheesecake Factory did perfectly fine on Valentine’s Day. Apparently, everybody went to Cheesecake Factory on Valentine’s Day this year. “We had a tremendous Valentine’s Day,” CFO Matt Clark told analysts this week.
Consumers, he said, still want to have a good time, which benefits the Cheesecake Factory and its other concepts. “I think people still want to go out and have an experience regardless, and so if they’re cutting back it might be more on the quick-serve side or those types of things,” Clark said.
And Chili’s continues to be Chili’s. The casual-dining chain saw a steep uptick in sales in October and, outside some apparent calendar shifts, not much has changed so far in 2025.
“Starting in October in the (fiscal) second quarter, we had a big increase,” CFO Michaela Ware said. “What I will tell you is that happened and it is sustained. There was a little noise in the quarter just because of holiday flips, but our sales have increased and so they’re staying at those levels and that momentum has continued into the third quarter.”
But not everybody was willing to speculate on current trends. “In terms of Q1 … there’s always a lot of noise, especially when you’re in the early part of Q1 with the weather, and it’s a little bit hard to get a read,” Restaurant Brands International CEO Josh Kobza said. “Our preference is probably going to be just to wait until we get through the quarter and share how it went overall.”
Senior Editor Joe Guszkowski contributed to this report.
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