5 big questions going into 2026

This is a crucial year for Starbucks and its CEO, Brian Niccol. | Photo: Shutterstock.

This is one of the strangest periods we recall in nearly 20 years covering the restaurant business. 

Every new year begins with it some question marks and uncertainties. But we can’t recall a year in which we just had no idea what was going to happen so much as this year. It doesn’t mean we were right in many of those past years and in fact we were frequently wrong—like last year, when we thought that 2025 would be better than 2024, which it really wasn’t.

But there are just so many concerns and potential black swan events that could interrupt a potential recovery, or worse. Anyway, let’s look at some of the big questions we have heading into 2026. 

Will consumers return to restaurants?

The U.S. GDP rose 4.3% in the third quarter, according to recent government data. Much of the reason? Consumer spending remains resilient. 

Which just means that the economy is apparently different for restaurants than it is for everybody else. Publicly traded chains that quarter generated less than a half a point in same-store sales on average and a bunch of chains that should be doing well in a market like this—ahem, Sweetgreen—are decidedly doing not well.

In other words, we can’t really look to the economy for guidance.

Will this change in 2026? At the very least chains have easier comparisons to work with. And our colleagues at Technomic believe things will get better, which David Henkes and I talked about on this week’s A Deeper Dive podcast. 

My guess is no, that you can expect more of the same this year, largely due to two factors: Population growth and pricing. The U.S. is not adding more people—there’s some expectation that the population actually shrunk last year—and consumers still think restaurants are too expensive.

Was the fast-casual slowdown a blip?

The biggest surprise of 2025 was the slowdown in the fast-casual sector. If you look at the Restaurant Business Same-Store Sales Tracker, fast-casual chains badly underperformed every other sector in the third quarter.

Several chains face existential questions from investors, notably Sweetgreen, which is stumbling for reasons we can’t quite figure out. Chipotle, for the first non-e. coli time in its history, is looking like just another restaurant chain, which has hammered its stock as investors rethink the company’s valuation. 

There is arguably more pressure on those chains than anybody else in the industry, given the valuations investors have been giving them. We believe they can prove the naysayers wrong. But it’s no slam dunk.

Can Starbucks maintain its momentum?

Speaking of head-scratchers and pressured executives, we remain surprised by the persistence of Starbucks’ sales slowdown. 

Maybe we shouldn’t. The company has over the past few years dealt with something no other major restaurant chain has faced in the form of a unionization campaign and publicity surrounding it. Younger consumers are more pro-union than older consumers, and so it goes to reason that they may sour on the Seattle-based giant. 

But the company has proven its ability to get people in the door for days like Red Cup Day or the annual reintroduction of the Pumpkin Spice Latte. And it was showing some sales and traffic momentum in the late summer and into November. This will be the year that CEO Brian Niccol, hired in 2024 to fix things, must prove his worth.

What will happen with Fat Brands?

Last year ended with major questions about Fat Brands, which in 2020 went from shopping on the bargain rack for small, struggling restaurant chains to buying nearly $900 million worth of chains in a 12-month period. It did so the good, old-fashioned way: With a lot of debt.

Those chains have mostly struggled and didn’t have enough cash to make its debt payment, putting Fat Brands in serious risk of bankruptcy. It has been sued by franchisees of multiple brands accusing the company of raiding the marketing fund and not paying out rebates from Pepsi. 

The jewel in the Fat Brands crown, Twin Peaks, is now struggling with weak sales and a several of its top executives have all left, leaving Fat Brands CEO Andy Wiederhorn to take the top job there. 

Will a restaurant chain go public?

One restaurant chain went public last year, in the form of Black Rock Coffee Bar, and it has done fine. Yet we get the sense that the market for industry IPOs remains closed, for the most part, and you only need to look at the industry’s stock performance.

Our own stock index declined 7% last year when the S&P 500 rose 16%. That is the biggest gap in industry performance versus the broader market that we’ve ever seen. You think a company is going to go public in that environment?

Things could change and, as we’ve heard over and over again from Piper Sandler’s Damon Chandik, good companies can go public in any market. So maybe there’s a chicken chain or another beverage chain considering an IPO this year. But we would not hold our breath without a major recovery in industry stocks.