Little has been predictable in the past five years since the pandemic—or at least that’s what it feels like after an extended era of stimulus funding, crackdown regulations, and shifts in customer demands and spending. Certainly, the pandemic marked a shift in how restaurants do business. But according to a recent Nation’s Restaurant News (NRN) article, Alicia Kelso, senior editor, shares that there isn’t as much difference between a pre-pandemic customer and a 2025 customer. She writes, “‘The consumer was discerning in 2019, too, and not all these companies were doing great in 2019,’” quoting William Blair analyst Sharon Zackfia, who believes that “consumers are generally just returning to ‘normal’ – meaning their pre-pandemic habits.”
Part of the difficulty in making consumer predictions for 2025 is the inconsistency of 2024. Four years of post-pandemic, restaurant business owners hoped to be back to a new normal standard; but with rising prices and other economic instability, it became trickier to assess consumer spending than economists might have hoped. “The end of 2024 looked much stronger compared to the beginning and middle of the year, as evidenced by sequential improvements in both traffic and sales at many, if not most, concepts. Sales at foodservice and drinking places declined by 0.3% month-over-month in December, according to new data from the United States Census, tempering any extreme bullishness, but they were up 2.4% versus the same period in 2023,” Kelso writes.
Despite the lack of hard data, experts are cautiously optimistic about the state of the restaurant and hospitality industry in the coming year. Zackfia predicts a “stable to improved environment,” aligning with Bloomberg Intelligence senior industry analyst Michael Halen’s assessment that, “Restaurant sales will advance with better consumer spending in 2025, we believe, as most recent sentiment and (Consumer Price Index) data showed improvement year-over-year.”
Of course, predictions only have a small influence on how restaurants choose to run their business. The daily operations of maintaining a restaurant during economic uncertainty remains largely specific to each establishment—and this is why working with a restaurant consultant can be especially beneficial. Our consultants can tailor-make menus and recommendations based on individual business analysis and local market research, which yields a much more individualized plan than those based on larger market predictions.
Richard Weil, owner and principal of National Restaurant Consultants (NRC), has an optimistic view. “As consumer confidence improves, and warmer weather ensues, I believe that dining out will once again rise again to the top of the mind for consumers. While concerns will continue to remain in the news, economic pressures may be only short lived as we navigate through additional pressures of world newsreels,” he says. “As food service and hospitality industry professionals, we strongly encourage our clients to rely on proven promotional and operational processes and take advantage of our 1-1.5 hours of free consulting advice to provide expert information and advice.”