A new Restaurant Trends Report from Toast provides an interesting look at dining and delivery habits as the industry moves further beyond the challenges presented by three years of pandemic adjustments. Notably, only Kansas City and Charleston, South Carolina, exceeded their pre-pandemic lunchtime volumes, while overall lunch spending is up across the country, partially due to price inflation.
Toast, the cloud-based point-of-sale and restaurant management provider, regularly provides reports on habits across the restaurant industry. Its latest report includes data based on transactions in 18 metropolitan areas between 11 AM and 3 PM local time on the Toast platform.
While much has changed in recent years, the results show remarkable recovery with dine-in still comprising 70 percent of lunchtime transactions, which is 9 percent below 2019 levels. Takeout is up 7 percent in the same timeframe, comprising 27 percent of all lunch transactions. Delivery was up 2 percent, to 3 percent of lunchtime orders.
Some of the data is unsurprising given broad-based, sticky changes in work-from-home behaviors. Friday is the busiest weekday period for lunch transactions in all U.S. states and the 18 metro areas analyzed.
Kansas City leads the list of U.S. metros that have recovered lunchtime transactions, now up 3 percent over the city’s 2019 volume. The next-closest cities were Charleston, up 2 percent to ’19, Milwaukee, down 1 percent and both Nashville and Austin, that are now at 9 percent below 2019 lunchtime transactions.
Lunch sales in large cities like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles remain far below 2019 levels, the first two down 23 percent and LA still down by 16 percent.
While many workers are still working from home or adopting hybrid structures that reduce total time spent in offices, weekday lunch checks are up 46 percent since 2019, with guests spending an average of $2 more on food per transaction if they dine in versus ordering takeout. The average dine-in order is $24, while the average takeout order is $22, up a respective 49 and 42 percent since 2019. Restaurants below a threshold of five transactions a day on the Toast platform were excluded.
Diving into alcohol as a percentage of lunch bills, Wisconsin—no surprise—tops the 50 states with 30 percent of weekday lunch bills including alcohol. Wyoming, Florida, Vermont, Colorado and Oregon were the next-highest states in that category. Utah and Arkansas were at the opposite end of the spectrum, with alcohol only present in 9 and 8 percent of lunchtime transactions. When looking at a mix of metro areas across the country, the Milwaukee metro area tied with the Denver metro area for the highest percentage of alcohol purchases at lunchtime.
Diving into inflation, Toast analyzed a typical modern breakfast—avocado toast with eggs and bacon—now costs restaurants 16 percent less than it did in 2022. On average, avocado prices are down 41 percent since 2022, while egg prices are up 67 percent. Bacon prices are down 13 percent since 2022.
“Inflation has been a roller coaster,” the report read. “Thankfully the cost of some items is beginning to cool off.”
