Dutch Bros’ growth earned CEO Christine Barone the Restaurant Leader of the Year. | Photo: Shutterstock.
This is from the weekly restaurant finance newsletter The Bottom Line. To get this in your inbox every Monday morning, click here.
The restaurant industry appears hellbent on changing its trajectory this year, at least judging by the first week of the year.
So far in January, restaurants have unleashed a host of new discount offers hoping to get price-focused consumers.
Meanwhile, my colleague Pat Cobe wrote about chains rolling out new limited-time offers. There were 4,000 of them in November alone, according to Technomic. That’s an awful lot of new menu items.
And at least 12 restaurant chains have introduced new protein-focused items already this month, as Pat wrote. Honestly the press releases on them were coming at us as if out of a Gatling gun.
All of this signals the state of the industry right now. Social media has grown into the most influential form of marketing right now, and companies are hoping to attract its attention. But they also face a crucial year as they work to recover from sales and traffic challenges that dominated 2025.
And so marketing departments are doing everything they can to get customers’ attention and offer price points they think will work.
This week’s financial news
Fat Brands executives were given big raises and retention bonuses as the company remains in danger of filing for bankruptcy. Two of the executives who received the extra pay happen to be the sons of the company’s founder. Fat Brands will be at the ICR conference this week so that should be interesting.
At the end of this piece I wondered whether any company would go public in 2026 and then immediately got my answer in the form of Jollibee. But that will be an interesting offering and one that can certainly go this year.
Compass Coffee filed for bankruptcy, adding its name to the long list of such filings among smaller and regional chains.
Denny’s shareholders are suing the company over its sale. There’s some interesting stuff in here about just how quickly that deal was put together.
Yes, GLP-1 users spend less on fast food. And the number of such users is about to increase considerably.
Theres some interesting data in this story about how consumers view value and their demands for more snack items.
Jack in the Box’s 75th anniversary is coming at a tough time.
Restaurant Leader of the Year
We at Restaurant Business named Dutch Bros CEO Christine Barone our 2026 Restaurant Leader of the Year. Barone has done an incredible job at the drive-thru beverage concept, which has helped make beverages a key source of restaurant industry growth. Also, it’s “bros” and not “brothers.”
Number of the week
Restaurants continued to add jobs despite an otherwise difficult market. And more than half of the jobs created in December were at a restaurant.
Quote of the week
“Foot traffic downtown has not returned, work patterns are different, and the economics of running urban cafes look very different than they did even a few years ago.” -Michael Haft, cofounder of Compass Coffee, in a LinkedIn post about why the company ended up in bankruptcy.
On the blog
I wrote about big questions, Jollibee and Jack in the Box. Check out all my blog posts on The Bottom Line.
On the podcasts
On A Deeper Dive I talked with David Henkes about the coming year. On The Week in Restaurants we chatted about protein, Salad and Go and Fat Brands.
For questions, comments or story ideas, send me an email at jonathan.maze@informa.com. And follow me on Twitter at @jonathanmaze. And also LinkedIn. And TikTok.
