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Riko’s completed its purchase of Merrick and Levittown restaurants August 31. The transfer changes ownership within a 13-location system as another Long Island site remains planned.

Salt Hank’s planned entry into Wonder begins with one location and continued culinary leadership. The test is whether the product can travel with its reputation.

Limited-service meal and snack prices rose faster in July than full-service prices, while annual inflation rates converged and grocery categories diverged.

Yum's nearly $9 billion digital-sales figure excludes Pizza Hut. Consistent brands and ordering definitions matter when comparing adoption.

July results show stronger sales and restaurant margins, modest debt reduction, and a smaller chain still facing a July 2027 maturity.

Chipotle’s July 13 announcement names the first Mexico restaurant and a staggered expansion plan, following its 2025 development agreement with Alsea.

Chipotle’s July update spans six portfolio companies. Earlier announcements distinguish venture investment from restaurant trials and operating adoption.

June’s employment report points to weaker seasonal hiring. Restaurant staffing decisions still depend on local demand, shift coverage and retention.

OTB Hospitality says it filed Chapter 7 after closing company restaurants, a year after Pappas’ acquisition. Independent franchise locations remain outside the filing.

The Koetting family’s Ohio agreement targets a first Shipley shop for early 2027, followed by two more through 2029.

Producer energy prices rose faster than food prices in May. Restaurant buyers need invoice weights and contract terms to estimate their own cost changes.

Ghai bought 44 Houston Taco Bells. Its CEO’s geographic rationale and Taco Bell’s beverage plans explain the appeal of expanding within a familiar brand.

Pasadena would add direct company operation to a U.S. business already developed through franchises, with no opening date yet announced.

The planned Queen Street West opening sits alongside 39 reported open locations and a much larger development pipeline.

March’s CPI shows why slowing menu inflation does not automatically improve the comparison with groceries, and why the gap says little about restaurant profit.

Nearly nine in ten restaurant operators say they are optimistic about 2026. Meanwhile, 68% of consumers are cutting back on dining out and spending $25 less per week than they did last summer. The gap between what operators believe and what customers are doing has never been wider.

Beyond Meat received a Nasdaq delisting warning in March 2026 after its stock traded below $1 for 30 consecutive days. The company's collapse from a $14 billion peak now threatens the supply chain for restaurant chains that built menus around its products.

The drive-thru salad chain went from 146 locations to 71 in less than a year. New CEO Mike Tattersfield says the brand was growing just for growth's sake. Here is what operators can learn from one of the sharpest contractions in recent QSR history.

The Chipotle founder and a Peloton cofounder are building a sandwich chain on proprietary technology. Four Manhattan locations in, Counter Service is a test case for whether data-driven infrastructure can scale real food the way Chipotle once did.

Black Box Intelligence data flags 15% of U.S. restaurants as closure risks in 2026, up from earlier estimates of 9% for full-service operators alone. With 42% of operators reporting unprofitable operations in 2025 and food costs still 35% above pre-pandemic levels, the shake-out has begun.

Industry consultant John Gordon's March 2026 assessment is blunt: there are no visible catalysts to shift the current conditions facing restaurant operators. With $1.55 trillion in projected sales masking flat traffic, 1,000+ chain closures, and margin compression on every front, the first half of 2026 is shaping up as a grind.

McDonald's plans to open more than 8,000 new restaurants by the end of 2027, reaching 50,000 locations worldwide. The ambition is historic, and the risks are just as large as the opportunity.

Jimmy John's launched a gyro LTO on March 5, 2026, becoming the latest legacy chain to chase the Mediterranean wave CAVA turned into a billion-dollar category. For operators, the trend raises real questions about who wins when everyone borrows the same playbook.

White Castle will open its first-ever Texas location at Grandscape in The Colony this summer, marking only the chain's seventh outpost outside the Midwest and a calculated bet on the nation's most competitive QSR battleground.

The International Pizza Expo returns to Las Vegas this week with 10,000 professionals, 500 exhibitors, and a competitive landscape that mirrors the industry itself: winners pulling away while weak operators struggle to survive.

Beef hit $9.64 per pound in February, the highest price ever recorded. Eggs are projected to fall 27.4% this year. The widest protein cost gap in decades is forcing operators to rethink menu engineering, daypart strategy, and pricing architecture.

Black Box Intelligence data shows 9% of full-service restaurants are at risk of closure in 2026, with 3% already past the point of no return. The format divergence between fast casual and traditional sit-down dining is accelerating.

CAVA crossed $1 billion in annual revenue for the first time in 2025, growing 22.5% year-over-year while opening 72 new restaurants. With 76 more planned for 2026 and a 1,000-store target by 2032, the Mediterranean chain is rewriting the fast-casual growth playbook.

Nearly half of all quick-service restaurant visits are now solo occasions, up from 31% four years ago. The chains adapting their menus, store formats, and loyalty tech to single-guest economics are pulling ahead.

From Shake Shack's GLP-1 friendly 'Good Fit' menu to Smoothie King's dedicated drug-user section, chains are engineering menus around a growing cohort of Americans on weight loss medications. Operators who ignore this shift do so at their own risk.

FAT Brands is pushing Fatburger into France with 30 units targeted by 2028, starting with a new location near Paris. The expansion raises a pointed question for the industry: can a financially distressed franchisor build a winning international presence while fighting through Chapter 11 at home?

KFC, the chain that invented fast-food fried chicken in America, has fallen to fifth place among US chicken chains. Consumer spending dropped 4% to $4.34 billion as Raising Cane's and Wingstop surged past the Yum Brands stalwart, exposing structural problems no LTO can fix.

A College Station chicken finger brand that once operated a single restaurant near Texas A&M is now chasing statewide saturation. A 44-unit deal with C5 Restaurants signals Layne's may be on a trajectory similar to Raising Cane's early expansion years. Whether the crowded chicken QSR segment leaves room for another ascent is the central question operators and investors should be asking.

Zaxby's quietly surpassed 1,000 restaurants in January 2026, operating across 22 states with 60+ new openings planned for the year. The brand's Modern Farmhouse prototype and Goldman Sachs-backed expansion push raise a core question for the industry: can a deeply regional chain scale to national relevance without losing what made it work?

Roark Capital paid roughly $1 billion for a 245-unit Nashville hot chicken chain in June 2025. The math only makes sense if you understand the Wingstop playbook Roark has already run once before, and why Dave's Hot Chicken might be the one brand positioned to repeat it.

A California super-premium chicken chain just signed its biggest development deal ever, with a Texas auto dealership empire as the franchisee.

Gong cha's acquisition of master franchise rights covering 170 U.S. locations signals a structural shift in how the global bubble tea leader plans to control its American growth.

Raising Cane's milestone 1,000th location on Hollywood Boulevard is more than a vanity number. It signals a brand with serious scale ambitions, a World Cup strategy, and a founder finally coming home.

MCL, once a 30-location Midwest cafeteria institution, is closing five more units this month and citing years of declining sales. What the chain's collapse reveals about America's dying cafeteria format.

Marc Lore's Wonder has raised $600 million at a $7 billion valuation and acquired Grubhub for $650 million, building a food hall concept that promises to solve what ghost kitchens never could. The model is ambitious, the expansion pace is aggressive, and the implications for QSR operators are significant.

Chipotle Mexican Grill is entering Mexico for the first time in 2026, selling American-interpreted Mexican food to the nation that invented the original. The irony is obvious. The business logic, though, is worth examining carefully.

Long John Silver's ended 2024 with just 485 locations, down from roughly 1,500 at its early-2000s peak. The chain's 57-year slide offers a case study in structural disadvantage, franchise economics gone wrong, and the limits of turnaround playbooks.

The Supreme Court struck down IEEPA-based tariffs in February, then the White House pivoted to Section 122 authority within four days. For QSR procurement teams, the legal ground has never shifted faster.

The FTC just secured a $17 million settlement against Xponential Fitness, the largest monetary recovery in a franchise case in FTC history. The violations have nothing to do with fitness and everything to do with how franchisors sell franchises. QSR brands should read the complaint carefully.

Wingstop opened a record 493 net new restaurants in FY2025 while posting its first domestic same-store sales decline in 22 years. Is this a cyclical correction, or is the brand growing faster than its own unit economics can absorb?

The most-hyped QSR co-branding deal in years lasted 15 months before collapsing under logistics costs and demand that never materialized. Here's the anatomy of a failure, and what every operator and investor should take from it.

With ground beef hitting $6.69 per pound and the U.S. cattle herd at a 75-year low, QSR chains are racing toward chicken with an urgency that goes beyond trend-chasing. From McDonald's Chicken Big Mac to Taco Bell's poultry pivot to Raising Cane's 1,000th location, the competitive dynamics of 2026 are reshaping how every operator thinks about protein.

While closing up to 600 U.S. restaurants, Wendy's is signing franchise agreements for 60+ new locations in Mexico. The strategic logic behind the pivot, and what it means for the chain's long-term trajectory.