Lunch hour drives traffic gains at global eateries, NPD says

What little growth the foodservice industry is seeing is largely attributable to lunch sales, according to the latest CREST data from The NPD Group. Mid-day is the driving daypart, up slightly not just in the U.S. but in seven of the 10 countries the researcher tracks.

“The weak performance of the full-service restaurant segment in the U.S. is evident in the lunch daypart visit declines there,” NPD reports. Recent moves such as Olive Garden’s addition of its Italiano Burger at lunch and Bob Evans Restaurants’ creation of a budget tier on its menu and revival of its Knife & Fork Sandwiches are responses to the lunch-traffic decline NPD finds.

Canada is the outlier in this, however. Full-service restaurants were the only segment to post growth in Q3.

Despite all the would-be fixes to menus and marketing applied by U.S. restaurants in all categories, customer traffic remained flat in Q3 for the second consecutive quarter. Average check rose 2% to $6.47 in the U.S. That continues to be lower than the check average in nearly all other markets tracked (see the chart). One exception is China, where the average restaurant check remained lowest at $3.22 despite a 4.8% increase in Q3.

Britain showed surprising strength in Q3 with customer traffic up 2% compared with a year ago. “Looking back at the past 12 months, visits to pubs in the UK have increased but there is no one trend driving the UK foodservice market at the moment,” according to Cyril Lavenant, NPD director of foodservice for Great Britain. “Instead it is a complex picture by daypart, consumer segment and category. Foodservice operators really do need to understand how consumers are behaving across the sector and how that is changing quarter by quarter if they are to tap into the growth areas, and address those that are static or in decline.”

There are some indications that Q4 numbers for U.S. restaurants will show improvement: the National Restaurant Association’s Restaurant Performance Index hit a five-month high in November. Its Current Situation Index—which measures trends in same-store sales, traffic, labor and capital expenditures—hit its highest level in six months.