If you’re a decision maker at your company, you need to be on the bleeding edge of, well, everything. But before you go signing up for seminars, conferences, lunch ‘n learns, and all that jazz, just know there’s a far better (and simpler) way: Subscribing to The Deep View.

This daily newsletter condenses everything you need to know about the latest and greatest AI developments into a 5-minute read. Squeeze it into your morning coffee break and before you know it, you’ll be an expert too.

Subscribe right here. It’s totally free, wildly informative, and trusted by 600,000+ readers at Google, Meta, Microsoft, and beyond.

For fifteen years, TNI Restaurant Consultants have published its annual trends report to identify the forces reshaping restaurants, foodservice and consumer demand, and to translate those forces into commercial opportunity. Six months into 2026, the market is providing a particularly clear view of how those forces are developing. Consumer appetite for new food, beverage and dining experiences remains strong, innovation continues to accelerate, and several of the trends identified entering the year are moving decisively into the mainstream. What has also become clearer is the environment in which those trends now have to perform: consumers remain engaged, but they are becoming considerably more selective about where, when and how often they eat out.

The numbers illustrate the distinction. Restaurant sales continue to grow, but traffic remains under pressure, with June marking the sixteenth month in seventeen in which operators reported a net decline in customer traffic. The industry's latest 2026 outlook points to approximately 4.3% nominal sales growth and around 0.8% growth after inflation. At the same time, 64% of consumers entered the year looking forward to new food and beverage trends, with enthusiasm particularly strong among younger consumers. There is no shortage of appetite for what the restaurant industry creates. The challenge is converting that appetite into another occasion.

This distinction matters because consumer interest and commercial demand are increasingly two different measurements. A flavor can generate enormous attention without creating another restaurant visit. A wellness proposition can resonate strongly without changing frequency. A consumer can genuinely want better ingredients, more protein, interesting beverages, global flavors, convenience and memorable experiences while simultaneously choosing to eat out one fewer time this month. Those behaviors are not contradictory. Together, they describe the restaurant consumer of 2026.

For operators, this changes the strategic question. Understanding what consumers want remains essential, but it is no longer sufficient. The more valuable question is what makes a restaurant sufficiently relevant, useful, enjoyable or distinctive to earn another visit. TNI defines this as Earned Frequency: the number of occasions a brand can credibly earn from the same guest within a given period. It connects trend intelligence to commercial performance and provides a more useful lens through which to consider the second half of the year.

Seen this way, 2026 presents considerable opportunity. Functional eating is moving rapidly into the mainstream as protein becomes an everyday expectation and fiber follows it. Plant-forward dining is evolving towards recognizable whole ingredients. Zero-proof, tea-forward and refresher beverages are expanding the definition of the beverage occasion. Global discovery remains powerful, but increasingly travels through familiar formats. New Essentialism continues to demonstrate the commercial strength of recognition executed better. GLP-1 consumers are emerging not simply as a changing appetite profile, but as a valuable and highly engaged restaurant customer. And AI is beginning to alter the route through which consumers discover and select restaurants.

The market is changing in another important respect. Convenience has become ubiquitous, technology is increasingly infrastructure rather than differentiation, and consumers have more ways than ever to access food without entering a restaurant. That makes the physical experience, the clarity of the proposition and the quality of hospitality more important, not less. Restaurants have spent much of the last decade removing friction from transactions. The opportunity ahead is to add value back into the occasion.

The implications for the second half are therefore less about chasing the next trend and more about converting the right trends into repeatable reasons to visit. The strongest operators will be those that understand precisely what they stand for, innovate around occasions rather than novelty, build menu and beverage architecture around changing consumer needs, become easier to discover in an AI-mediated world and use technology to strengthen rather than dilute hospitality.

That leads to the central conclusion of our mid-year analysis:

Consumer appetite remains abundant, but attendance is becoming more selective. The competitive advantage in 2026 will belong to the brands that learn how to earn frequency.

TNI has tracked Food as Medicine since 2018, and 2026 is increasingly the year in which that thinking moves from wellness adjacency into mainstream menu architecture. Fiber is perhaps the clearest example. Only a small proportion of American adults currently achieve recommended daily fiber intake, while interest in high-fiber foods and beverages is particularly strong among younger consumers, with 60% of Gen Z expressing interest. The underlying opportunity is substantial, but the commercial lesson is less about announcing nutrition than integrating it intelligently into food people already want to eat.

Restaurants should resist communicating functionality in the same way as packaged goods. Retail packaging can successfully lead with grams, claims and nutritional benefits because the package itself has to do much of the selling. Restaurants operate differently. A menu is first an appetite document. Bread, beans, grains, vegetables, soups, bowls and sides can deliver meaningful functional benefits without making customers feel they are ordering from a nutritional program. The strongest execution will make the benefit sufficiently visible while keeping pleasure firmly in the foreground.

Protein has travelled even further along this curve. Menu penetration of protein has grown 111% over four years and 52% of consumers identified increasing their protein intake as a priority entering 2026. This is no longer primarily a fitness niche. Protein is becoming an everyday expectation across food, snacks and beverages, and fiber increasingly appears to be moving along a similar path.

The broader strategic lesson is that function should become an attribute of desirable food rather than a category sitting beside it. Consumers increasingly expect food to do more for them, but they have not stopped wanting it to taste good, look good and feel emotionally rewarding. The brands that understand that distinction will capture the wellness opportunity without having to become wellness brands.

Plant-forward dining is not disappearing; it is maturing. The important shift is away from the assumption that replacing animal protein with a highly engineered imitation is necessarily the destination. Consumers are increasingly scrutinizing what sits behind health and sustainability claims, and ingredient transparency is becoming more important to perceptions of quality, naturalness and trust.

This creates an attractive opening for a more sophisticated form of plant-forward menu development built around vegetables, grains, beans, legumes, mushrooms, fermentation and recognizable ingredients, with premium animal protein used selectively where it contributes the greatest flavor and perceived value. The objective is no longer to reproduce meat at all costs. It is to make plants compelling enough to occupy more of the plate.

There is also a larger consumer movement beneath this shift. Legibility is becoming a premium attribute. Shorter ingredient stories, visible preparation and foods that consumers instinctively understand can create trust in a way that complicated formulations cannot. This connects directly with TNI's New Essentialism thesis: familiar products, better ingredients, cleaner execution and enough modernization to feel contemporary without becoming unfamiliar.

For operators, this creates a much broader opportunity than the plant-based conversation of the last decade suggested. Vegetables do not need to imitate meat to justify menu space. Grains do not need a health claim to become desirable. Beans do not need to be repositioned as alternative protein before they become commercially useful. The opportunity is to make the inherent strengths of these ingredients, flavor, texture, versatility, value and familiarity, the reason they are ordered.

Few areas of foodservice offer the combination of frequency, margin and innovation potential currently available in beverages. Refreshers have increased 127% on US restaurant menus over four years, while more than half of operators say refresher sales increased in the last year. Matcha latte menu penetration has risen 218% over the same four-year period, and 49% of Gen Z consumers said reducing alcohol consumption would be important when considering their health in 2026. Tea-forward, refresher and zero-proof drinking have therefore moved well beyond accommodation and are becoming part of mainstream beverage architecture.

The opportunity now moves into a second phase because demand alone is not sufficient. Matcha provides the clearest illustration. Rapid consumer adoption has collided with a constrained premium tea supply chain and sharply higher ingredient costs. The lesson extends far beyond matcha. Any beverage capable of becoming a meaningful traffic or revenue driver also creates commodity exposure, and operators need to understand the economics beneath a trend before scaling it.

That does not reduce the attractiveness of beverages. It makes the opportunity more sophisticated. Tea, refreshers, zero-proof drinks, functional hydration and emerging protein beverages can create occasions outside the traditional meal, support afternoon traffic and provide accessible premiumization without asking consumers to commit to a full restaurant check. In a market where frequency is increasingly valuable, that is strategically significant.

One of the more interesting whitespace opportunities sits at the intersection of protein and carbonated beverages. Protein demand is already mainstream, yet protein remains dramatically underrepresented in sparkling soft drinks. Technical advances in clear protein are making lighter, flavor-forward formats increasingly viable, while consumers are already experimenting with protein-and-soda combinations themselves. High consumer demand, limited established supply and observable experimentation are precisely the combination we look for when identifying an emerging category.

The opportunity is not another gym drink. It is an everyday beverage that happens to deliver meaningful protein: light, sparkling, flavor-led, single-serve and appropriate for the office, restaurant or hotel rather than exclusively the gym bag. For restaurant groups, hotels and beverage developers, functional sparkling beverages deserve serious attention as a capital-light innovation space.

The larger lesson is equally important. Beverage strategy can no longer separate consumer demand from supply economics. The next generation of beverage winners will understand both.

Consumers have not lost their appetite for discovery, but the mechanism through which discovery travels is changing. Highly specific cuisines continue to create cultural interest, yet mainstream adoption is occurring more rapidly through flavors, condiments and ingredients introduced inside familiar formats. Hot honey has grown 197% on US restaurant menus over four years and now appears on approximately 11% of menus. Chamoy has grown 204% over the same period. These are substantial movements because they allow consumers to experience novelty without committing an entire dining occasion to an unfamiliar cuisine.

This tells us something important about the Adventure quadrant of the TNI Four-Quadrant Demand Map. Consumers may hesitate before committing dinner to a cuisine they do not know, but they will readily experiment with a new flavor on chicken, pizza, fries, tacos, sandwiches or beverages they already understand. Familiarity reduces the perceived risk of discovery.

For operators, this creates a considerably more capital-efficient approach to innovation. Instead of building an entire concept around the latest emerging cuisine, restaurants can import flavor systems, preparation methods, ingredients and cultural references into formats with established demand. Adventure becomes easier to commercialize when the format is familiar and the discovery happens inside it.

The same principle helps explain the strength of New Essentialism, one of the themes TNI continues to see gaining commercial relevance. The idea is deceptively simple: familiar food revisited through better ingredients, stronger sourcing, improved execution and contemporary presentation rather than constant reinvention.

Basque cheesecake is a useful illustration. It has combined strong consumer interest with substantial menu growth because it delivers novelty without requiring explanation. The consumer already understands cheesecake; the Basque treatment supplies sufficient difference to make it feel contemporary. The product feels new without feeling risky.

That distinction matters enormously in a selective-frequency environment. Recognition reduces the cost of discovery. A restaurant does not always need to show customers something they have never seen. Frequently, the greater commercial opportunity is to give them something they already love, executed better than they expected.

Few consumer developments have generated as much discussion as GLP-1 medications, largely because the conversation began with appetite suppression. The emerging behavioral picture is considerably more interesting for restaurants. Roughly one in eight US adults now reports taking some form of GLP-1 medication, yet these consumers remain unusually active restaurant users, reporting approximately 7.6 restaurant purchases in a week compared with 5.1 among non-users.

Their relationship with restaurants also remains remarkably strong. Eighty-seven percent say they enjoy going to restaurants, 71% consider restaurants essential to their lifestyle and 76% say they would pay a premium for options aligned with their preferences. Some users are dining out less frequently than before beginning medication, while others are visiting more often or have made no meaningful change. What is changing most clearly is not the relevance of restaurants but the way the occasion is constructed.

For operators, that creates opportunity around smaller appetites, nutrient density, protein, texture, beverages and customization. Smaller portions do not need to mean diminished value if the quality density of the format increases. A guest eating less may still spend well when the product is better, the portion feels appropriate and personalization adds value rather than inconvenience.

This is where hospitality and product development meet. Smaller formats of better products, strong textural contrast, protein-forward architecture and familiar flavor anchors can preserve pleasure while accommodating changing appetites. Customization can become a genuine revenue opportunity when consumers have already demonstrated willingness to pay for it.

The objective should not be to build a GLP-1 menu. It should be to build a more flexible menu capable of serving a broader range of appetites and occasions. The commercial opportunity is right-sizing rather than downsizing.

That distinction will extend well beyond medication users. Smaller households, older consumers, health-conscious diners, snack-based eating and changing dayparts all create demand for more flexible portion architecture. Designing for one emerging consumer need can therefore improve the proposition for many others.

The first half of 2026 does not support a simple narrative that the consumer has become universally weak. Consumers continue to spend on restaurants, but performance across the industry is increasingly uneven. Some of the largest brands continue to produce healthy comparable sales and transaction growth, while others are experiencing meaningful declines. The lesson is not that one restaurant segment has discovered a universal formula. It is that clarity, relevance and perceived value are becoming increasingly important in determining where consumers allocate fewer, more deliberate occasions.

This reinforces the relevance of the TNI Four-Quadrant Demand Map: Quality, Value, Nostalgia and Adventure. These are motivations rather than demographics. The same consumer can seek Value at lunch, Quality on Saturday evening, Nostalgia on Sunday morning and Adventure while travelling. What matters is that the restaurant understands which motivation it is serving at a particular moment and builds the experience accordingly.

What is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain is strategic ambiguity. A restaurant priced as Quality but experienced as Value creates friction. A heritage restaurant that continuously changes the things customers remember undermines the very reason people return. An Adventure proposition that requires too much explanation limits its own frequency. A Value brand that continually adds complexity eventually compromises the economics that made it valuable in the first place.

The middle is therefore not simply a price point. It is often a symptom of a brand that has become unclear about what it is asking consumers to value. When the consumer was visiting restaurants more frequently, ambiguity could survive because there were more occasions to distribute. When occasions become more selective, every visit has to compete harder for its place.

This is why simplification remains such an important strategic discipline. Before adding menu items, technology, formats or design language, operators should establish what the brand is uniquely entitled to own. The strongest innovation frequently begins with subtraction. Clarify the proposition, remove the things that dilute it, and then innovate from a stronger foundation.

Scale does not change that requirement. Thousands of restaurant locations continue to close, relocate, convert or change ownership across North America every year, including significant numbers within chain systems. Scale remains a tremendous advantage when the proposition is strong, but it also multiplies the consequences when the proposition becomes unclear.

Restaurant strategy has traditionally placed enormous weight on traffic, but aggregate traffic is increasingly an incomplete way to understand the business. The more revealing question for the second half is how many occasions a brand can credibly earn from the same household in a month. That is the basis of TNI's Earned Frequency framework.

Earned Frequency changes the management conversation because it moves the focus from acquisition towards relevance. Traditional traffic-building asks how the restaurant finds another customer. Earned Frequency asks what would make an existing customer consider a fourth visit this month as reasonable as their first. That question immediately touches menu architecture, price ladders, dayparts, beverages, promotions, loyalty and experience.

A restaurant may earn breakfast because it is convenient, lunch because it represents value, an afternoon beverage because it offers accessible indulgence and dinner because it provides connection. Those occasions need not compete with one another. Properly designed, they accumulate. The strategic opportunity is therefore to understand the portfolio of occasions a brand can credibly own rather than treating every customer visit as the same transaction.

This is particularly important because price alone cannot indefinitely compensate for weaker traffic. Restaurant sales continue to grow, but inflation-adjusted growth remains modest, while menu prices have continued to rise faster than the price of food consumed at home. Every time that gap widens, the restaurant occasion must work harder to justify itself.

The comparison with home is not purely economic. Consumers do not sit at the kitchen table calculating restaurant inflation against grocery inflation before deciding where to eat. They make a more instinctive assessment of whether the restaurant occasion is worth the money, effort and time. The answer can be yes because the restaurant is easier, better, more interesting, more social, more indulgent or simply more enjoyable. But there has to be an answer.

Earned Frequency also changes how loyalty should be understood. A program that merely discounts visits that would have happened anyway is not creating loyalty; it is subsidizing existing behavior. The more valuable objective is to create the next occasion, encourage movement into another daypart, reactivate a lapsing customer or give an existing guest a reason to try another part of the menu.

Frequency is not simply a marketing metric. It is an operating discipline.

The restaurant discovery journey is changing because consumers increasingly have another layer between curiosity and purchase. Social platforms still generate awareness, search still matters, reviews remain influential and word of mouth remains powerful, but AI-assisted research is rapidly becoming part of the consideration process.

That matters because consumers can now describe an occasion rather than search for a restaurant. They can ask for a good high-protein lunch nearby, an Italian restaurant suitable for a date, somewhere healthy before work, a child-friendly restaurant with outdoor seating or the best value dinner within a particular distance. The result may arrive as a shortlist rather than a page of links.

The commercial question therefore changes. It is no longer only where the restaurant ranks. It is whether the restaurant is sufficiently well understood to be recommended at all.

This is the beginning of what TNI regards as Answer Engine Visibility. Restaurants need to become not only searchable but answerable. Menus, locations, operating hours, prices, dietary attributes, signature products and positioning need to be accurate and consistent across the digital ecosystem. A restaurant cannot expect an intelligent system to recommend it confidently when the information describing the business is incomplete, inconsistent or impossible to interpret.

This has implications well beyond SEO. Traditional search optimization largely asks whether a consumer can find the restaurant after expressing an interest. Answer-engine visibility asks whether the restaurant becomes part of the answer before the consumer has selected a brand.

That is a fundamentally different marketing challenge, and operators should begin assigning ownership to it now.

The rapid adoption of AI creates an interesting paradox for restaurants. Consumers are becoming comfortable using intelligent technology when they choose to use it, particularly for discovery, planning and decision support. At the same time, there is growing evidence of fatigue when technology is imposed unnecessarily on experiences where people still value human judgement. Restaurants sit directly in the middle of that tension.

The industry has spent much of the last decade digitizing convenience. Ordering, payment, pickup, delivery, reservations, loyalty and increasingly parts of service have been moved onto screens. Much of that has been beneficial. Friction that adds no value should be removed, and technology can make restaurants faster, more accurate and more productive.

But convenience is becoming infrastructure. When almost every serious operator offers digital ordering, delivery, pickup and some form of loyalty, those capabilities stop functioning as meaningful differentiators. Their absence can hurt the business, but their presence alone does not provide a compelling reason to choose it.

That leaves the physical restaurant with a fascinating opportunity. As transactions become more automated, genuine human interaction becomes less common and therefore potentially more valuable. Recognition, generosity, confidence, judgement and warmth are difficult to commoditise because they depend on people.

This connects directly to the Kindness Advantage thesis TNI has been developing across its work. Restaurants occupy an unusual position in modern life. They sell food, but they also sell human contact, ritual, celebration, familiarity and belonging. In a world becoming more digitally efficient and, in many respects, less personally connected, those qualities deserve to be treated as economic assets rather than soft operational extras.

The technology strategy therefore needs to become more precise. Use AI to forecast. Use it to improve procurement. Use it to reduce administrative work. Use it to understand customers. Use it to improve discovery. Use it to remove friction guests do not value. Then allow people to do what people remain exceptionally good at.

Technology should make hospitality easier to deliver. It should not become an excuse to remove it.

The first priority for the remainder of 2026 is to rebuild the operating plan around Earned Frequency. Operators should understand how many occasions per household the brand currently earns, how those occasions divide across dayparts and where the most credible incremental visit can come from. Instead of asking marketing teams simply to generate more traffic, leadership should identify what would make an existing guest visit once more each month. In many businesses, one additional credible occasion from an existing customer will be economically more attractive than continually purchasing new customers at the top of the funnel.

The second priority is to make the brand's position unmistakable. Every operator should examine the business through the TNI Four-Quadrant Demand Map and determine which motivation leads: Quality, Value, Nostalgia or Adventure. More than one can coexist, but the consumer should never have to work out why the restaurant deserves the price it charges. Menu, service, environment, communication and pricing should reinforce the same proposition. Where they conflict, simplification should come before further innovation. Clarity is not a branding exercise in this environment; it is an economic advantage.

The third priority is to redesign menu architecture around the consumer behaviours that are strengthening. Protein should increasingly be treated as a baseline expectation, fiber as an accelerating opportunity, and plant-forward food as an exercise in ingredient quality and legibility rather than imitation. Smaller appetites should be met with better right-sized formats rather than indiscriminate portion reduction. Functional benefits should be integrated into products people already want rather than isolated in worthy but commercially narrow sections of the menu. The objective is not to make the restaurant feel healthier. It is to make desirable food work harder.

The fourth priority is to treat beverages as a frequency platform rather than a menu appendix. Tea, refreshers, zero-proof, functional hydration and emerging protein formats can create incremental occasions, support afternoon and weekday demand and deliver accessible premiumisation. But every meaningful beverage innovation now requires supply economics beside consumer demand. Hero ingredients should be understood from both a sourcing and margin perspective before they become large enough to expose the business. Beverage innovation without procurement intelligence is only half a strategy.

The fifth priority is to move innovation closer to familiarity. Operators do not need an endless succession of new cuisines and concepts to remain culturally relevant. New flavours, condiments, preparations and ingredients can travel through formats customers already understand, creating discovery without unnecessarily increasing the risk of trial. The same principle applies to established brands. The most valuable innovation may be a better expression of something customers already love rather than another item competing for attention. Recognition executed exceptionally well remains one of the most underappreciated forms of innovation in foodservice.

The sixth priority is to redesign marketing around the journey consumers are actually taking. Loyalty should be measured by incremental frequency rather than enrolment, digital information should be structured so that both search engines and AI systems can understand the proposition, and Answer Engine Visibility should become a formal responsibility. Operators should know what an AI assistant understands about their restaurant, what occasions it associates with the brand and whether the restaurant appears when consumers describe a need rather than search for the company by name. Search optimisation remains important, but recommendation visibility is becoming the next competitive layer.

Finally, all of these priorities should reinforce rather than weaken hospitality. Technology should be used aggressively backstage where it improves forecasting, productivity, consistency and decision-making. It should be deployed more selectively where the consumer is paying for judgement, warmth or experience. The restaurant of the future does not have to choose between technology and humanity. The better model is technology that creates more capacity for humanity.

The first half of 2026 does not describe a restaurant consumer in retreat. It describes a consumer becoming more intentional. People still want new food and beverage experiences. They remain interested in wellness, convenience, value, indulgence, global discovery and social connection. Restaurant spending continues to grow. What has changed is the level of justification increasingly required to earn each occasion.

That should be an encouraging conclusion for operators because frequency is not simply something that happens to a restaurant. It can be designed. Menu architecture can create it. Beverages can create it. Dayparts can create it. Pricing and loyalty can encourage it. Better discovery can capture it. Most importantly, memorable hospitality can turn an occasional customer into a habitual one.

The trends themselves are becoming clearer. Functional food is moving into the mainstream without requiring consumers to surrender pleasure. Plant-forward dining is becoming more natural and ingredient-led. Zero-proof, tea-forward and refresher beverages are expanding the definition of the beverage occasion. Global discovery is travelling successfully through familiar formats. Protein continues to move into new categories. AI is reshaping how consumers find restaurants. Accessible premiumization is creating opportunity between austerity and extravagance. And as convenience becomes ubiquitous, the human experience is becoming increasingly valuable.

The strategic requirement for the remainder of 2026 is therefore not to pursue every opportunity. It is to decide which opportunities strengthen the proposition, which create another credible occasion and which deserve operational investment. The strongest businesses will be those that become clearer about what they represent while becoming more sophisticated about when, why and how often their customers use them.

Fifteen years of tracking trends has taught us that identifying what comes next is only the beginning. The greater value comes from understanding what a trend changes commercially, how long that change is likely to last and what an operator should actually do about it. In 2026, that distinction matters more than ever.

Appetite remains abundant. The opportunity now is to turn that appetite into attendance, and attendance into earned frequency.

Imagine Change.

TNI Restaurant Consultants is the restaurant, hospitality and foodservice advisory practice of The Next Idea Group, working with established brands, emerging concepts, hotel and resort operators, foodservice companies, developers and investors across international markets. Led by restaurant strategist and author Robert Ancill, TNI combines commercial strategy, concept development, operational expertise, consumer intelligence and design thinking to help clients create new restaurant businesses, reposition existing brands and improve the performance and relevance of established operations.

TNI's work spans the full restaurant lifecycle, from market and feasibility analysis, brand positioning and concept creation through menu and beverage strategy, financial modelling, restaurant design, operational development, procurement, technology, marketing and launch. For mature and heritage brands, the practice also specializes in turnaround, repositioning and growth strategy, helping operators identify what should be protected, what should change and where future value can be created. This integrated approach allows TNI to consider a restaurant not simply as a menu, brand or operating model, but as a complete commercial system in which consumer demand, product, experience, economics and execution must work together.

Research and consumer intelligence are central to that approach. For fifteen years, TNI has published its annual Ultimate Guide to Restaurant & Food Trends, supported by continuous market observation, client work and TNI Street Teams monitoring restaurant, food, beverage, hospitality and consumer behavior across global markets. This work has contributed to proprietary strategic frameworks including the TNI Four-Quadrant Demand Map, Earned Frequency, the Return to Roots Playbook and the Heritage Turnaround Model, designed to translate changing consumer behavior into practical decisions around positioning, menus, pricing, innovation, experience and investment.

TNI's philosophy is deliberately commercial. Trends have value only when they can be translated into better restaurants, stronger customer propositions and sustainable financial performance. Whether developing a new concept, revitalizing an established institution, building a growth platform or determining where the next restaurant opportunity lies, TNI's role is to connect what consumers are becoming with what operators should do next.

TNI Restaurant Consultants | The Next Idea Group

Imagine Change.

The analysis and conclusions presented in this report combine TNI’s proprietary research, consulting experience and Street Team observations with current restaurant-industry, consumer, menu, corporate-performance and economic data. Sources include the National Restaurant Association, Black Box Intelligence, Datassential, RestaurantData, Pew Research Center, US government economic data, company disclosures and earnings reports, together with relevant published retail, ingredient, supply-chain and category research. These sources inform the report’s analysis of traffic, sales, consumer behaviour, food and beverage trends, GLP-1 usage, restaurant closures, AI adoption, digital discovery and emerging operating patterns.

All market data were reviewed against information available as of August 2026, with the most current figures used where forecasts or estimates had been revised during the year. Different sources use different methodologies, sample populations and reporting periods, so comparisons should be interpreted directionally unless otherwise stated. TNI’s objective is not to reproduce individual research studies, but to interpret multiple market signals through the TNI lens and translate them into commercially relevant implications for restaurant, hotel and foodservice operators.

The Next Idea Group | TNI Consulting
Imagine Change.