Median sales growth last year among the Top 500 chains was just 2.5% so, when adjusted for menu-price inflation, the typical chain last year saw a 1.3% decline in sales on a real-dollar basis. “It was a very, very weak year for the Top 500 overall from a sales perspective,” said Joe Pawlak, managing principal with Technomic, a sibling company of Restaurant Business and Nation’s Restaurant News. But unit growth remained strong last year, though fewer companies actually added new restaurants last year. Total unit count grew by 1.4%, again driven by high-growth chains like the beverage brands 7 Brew, Dutch Bros and Swig along with chains such as Dave’s Hot Chicken, Smalls Sliders and Super Chix. Yet that was slower than the unit count growth in 2024, when chains grew units by 1.6%. And nearly half, 48%, of the 500 largest chains either didn’t add new restaurants last year or closed some. And there was some surprising weakness at the top, as 19 of the 50 largest chains, including seven of the largest 20, finished the year with fewer locations than which they started. That includes mega chain Staarbucks along with Burger King and Subway. Nevertheless, last year’s weak performance has again raised questions
about whether the chain restaurant industry is overbuilt, six years after a pandemic led to wide swaths of industry closures. Inflation and weak sales performance have put pressure on restaurant-level sales and margins. Many chains closed underperforming restaurants in a bid to cut their losses on weak locations and strengthen their financial profiles while shifting sales to nearby restaurants. Subway, the fast-food sandwich chain that famously overdeveloped for years, has now closed 9,000 restaurants since 2015 as franchisees walk away from locations as leases and franchise agreements expire. “We’re adding too many units,” Pawlak said. “We just overbuilt. And that certainly has been a problem in the past. We just haven’t learned from our history.” There certainly were plenty of bright spots last year, none brighter than the coffee and beverage-snack sectors. Coffee café sales grew 6.1% last year, nearly double the rate of growth in 2024. But that masked
TOP 500 CHAIN RESTAURANT SALES
JULY 2026 RESTAURANT BUSINESS
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