Other findings
The breakfast daypart has seen a significant drop in sales throughout COVID-19, Black Box said. You can credit that to daily routine disruption and hordes of people working from home. Grabbing a coffee on the way to the office just isn’t what it used to be.
Black Box said breakfast comp sales plunged 80 percent in the week ending March 27, which represented a 19-percentage point drop in performance from the previous week. People are stocking up and staying in, and breakfast is feeling the burn because of it.
Pizza concepts, following a steady trend, continue to hold up the best, down just 15 percent in comp sales, followed by chicken and hamburger (negative 30 and 32 percent, respectively). Performance across all cuisine types varies widely, with bottom performers within the breakfast-centric concepts and bar and grill sector declining 83 and 74 percent apiece.
Grocery stores have started to stabilize a bit, Black Box said, with year-over-year growth of 15.5 percent last week. The previous period it soared 73.6 percent. This is likely the result of people trying to make their last trip’s haul last. Online grocery sales growth remains high, up 62.3 percent.
Quick-service restaurants experienced an uptick in share of consumer food spend by 3 percent, week-over-week, as grocery stores endured a 2 percent pullback and full service lost another 1 percent. Last week’s report showed that full-service share-of-stomach spend slipped below 5 percent. It’s now a tick lower.
While restaurant spend continues to decline for all age groups, the average restaurant is reporting a larger mix of spending from millennials and Gen Z consumers than it did a year ago.
Seventy-two percent of consumers who were dining weekly at full-service restaurants in early 2020 stopped doing do so during the week. Similarly, quick-serves vanquished 35 percent of their regular weekly guests.
High-frequency spenders, though, still exist among the consumers who have not eliminated their restaurant spend. Of those that doled out funds on restaurants during the week, 39 percent made at least five or more transactions during the period.
Additionally, in the week ending April 5, Black Box said the conversation around delivery and takeout on social media fell over the last two weeks with 15 percent fewer off-premises mentions (this is the week ending April 5 compared to the week ending March 22 when #TheGreatAmericanTakeout provided a lift.
And for two consecutive weeks, guest satisfaction for takeout has grown more positive while delivery satisfaction tracks more negative. The message there: Push even further into curbside, if possible.
This is a notion also backed by recent data from Sense360. The company, on April 2, ran a survey examining the types of ordering channels people are using, and whether they are switching to fresh types of products along the way.
Sense360 discovered that 60 percent of respondents reported placing an order online for takeout or home delivery since COVID-19. But takeout, which refers to order-ahead in this case, has been the most popular.
One in five people said they placed online orders for home delivery and takeout. Twenty-two percent said takeout only. Eighteen percent have tried only delivery. Forty percent have avoided both.
Also, 21 percent of people said they’d used online restaurant ordering for home delivery. Yet 31 percent said they’d tapped online restaurant ordering for in-store/curbside pickup.
Among the first-time delivery adopters, 42 percent said they ordered as least one new product category for pickup/takeout, and 64 percent plan to do so again after COVID-19.
The same numbers were lower for delivery—38 percent and 62 percent, respectively.