The customer data platform built exclusively for multi-unit restaurants.
A year ago, we surveyed 50 multi-unit restaurant CMOs about the state of the industry.
At the time, the outlook was cautious. Traffic was under pressure, consumers were increasingly value-conscious, and 66% of the CMOs we surveyed pointed to the macroeconomic environment and consumer sentiment as their biggest concern heading into 2026.
Recently, we sat down with five of those same CMOs to discuss how their predictions played out and what is top of mind for them now. We intentionally chose leaders from very different brands: a 400-unit QSR, a 50-unit casual dining concept, a 45-unit full-service brand, a 20-unit fast-casual concept, and a 15-unit full-service chain.
For the most part, last year’s concerns about the consumer were well founded. Traffic remains difficult, value matters enormously, and few expect the environment to meaningfully improve in the near term.
But the experience across these five brands look very different. Some CMOs are still aggressively looking for levers to drive traffic, others have accepted that transactions are down and are prioritizing profitability instead, and some are growing despite the environment.
In each conversation, we dug in with the CMO to understand how their brand is uniquely affected: what they have going for them in an environment like this, what's working against them, and how they're thinking about the macro. We also went deeper on some of last year's findings around third-party platforms, while unexpected new themes emerged around operations and the restaurant experience.
The 400-unit QSR CMO entered the year expecting the worst. “I thought it'd be sort of Armageddon,” he told us. Instead, he was surprised by “the resiliency of the consumer.”
That hasn’t meant his guest is immune to economic pressure. “When gas prices go up, we see breakfast sales go down,” he said. He also expects a difficult environment for QSR to persist into 2027 as commodity costs rise and brands have less room to pass those increases onto consumers.
After multiple years of sustained pressure with no clear end in sight, some CMOs are resetting their expectations for what success looks like. Last year, the CMO of a 45-unit full-service brand felt significant organizational pressure to drive traffic. This year, the conversation has changed. “You're not gonna be successful in driving traffic,” she said. “Transaction counts are just down… across the board for everybody.” Rather than discount aggressively to manufacture transactions, her organization has made a conscious decision to protect profitability on the traffic they do drive.
It's a surprising, but rational response to an environment where traffic is harder to come by and buying it through increasingly aggressive discounts can quickly become a losing proposition.
The 20-unit fast-casual concept stands out for a different reason. It was one of the strongest-performing brands in our survey last year, and it still is. When its CMO talks about periods of weaker performance this year, she points less to the broader consumer environment and more to specific disruptions, like the cyclospora news cycle and the World Cup. And when she talks about what's driving growth, the explanations are similarly specific: menu simplification, better digital merchandising, and a more active approach to third-party delivery.
In many ways, it sounds like a brand operating in a very different environment from the others we spoke with: performance moves up and down, but the explanations tend to be specific, identifiable, and largely within the brand's control.
The 50-unit casual dining CMO is similarly still searching for specific levers to change the trajectory. A $10.99 lunch deal, $4 Taco Tuesday, and kids-eat-free promotion are among the few occasions generating positive comparable traffic. In one market, meanwhile, the brand is up six to seven percent despite no obvious demographic reason it should be outperforming.
There’s little disagreement that the consumer is under pressure. Where these CMOs differ is in how they’re responding to it. For some, years of difficult traffic have changed what they’re willing to chase and what they consider a win. Others are still finding enough variation across markets, occasions, and channels to keep looking for growth. And for the strongest-performing brand we spoke with, the macro barely enters the explanation at all.
For several of the CMOs we spoke with, looking for those answers is increasingly taking them beyond marketing.
The CMO of the 15-unit full-service chain was particularly candid about this. While the brand is down roughly 3% in dine-in traffic this year, he is reluctant to blame the economy or affordability alone. His bigger frustration is that the brand spent years reacting to traffic pressure with short-term tactics rather than investing in the restaurant experience itself.
“We have damaged our brand by being too reactive and too tactical,” he said, describing the industry's intense focus on value as a “race to the bottom.” His view is that broad discounting may create a short-term sales lift, but it can also undermine the brand if the experience guests ultimately walk into isn't getting better.
In fact, he believes the money his brand has spent on discounts would have been better invested in improving its four walls. Consumers may be eating out less often, but he sees plenty of restaurants still winning because they've created an experience people are willing to leave home and pay for. His point is simple: marketing works a lot better when the experience behind it is stronger.
The 50-unit casual dining concept is confronting a similar question. Its CMO described a brand that considers itself casual dining, but whose restaurants haven't always delivered the experience guests expect from that category. Some locations don't use traditional plates and silverware, pickup traffic can converge with the host stand, and dining rooms weren't designed for an off-premise business that has grown from essentially zero to as much as half of sales.
Two newer restaurants were designed differently, with booths, bigger tables, more comfortable seating, plates and silverware, and clearer separation between dine-in guests and off-premise traffic. Despite opening in existing markets, they're beating pro forma by almost 30%.
The same CMO pointed to one existing market growing six to seven percent with little demographic explanation for its outperformance. Her conclusion was that those restaurants simply operate better: food quality, consistency, hospitality, labor and employees' ability to sell the menu. “There isn't any kind of silver bullet we can offer on the marketing side,” she said.
For full-service restaurants in particular, that may be one of the most important implications of today's consumer environment. When guests have fewer restaurant occasions to give, another campaign or discount can only go so far. Marketing can create a reason to visit. It can't be expected to compensate indefinitely for an experience that isn't worth coming back to.
Third-party delivery gave us another opportunity to revisit one of the bigger themes from last year's survey and see how it actually played out.
The most interesting finding wasn't simply that brands pulled back on third-party advertising. It was how differently the platforms responded when they did. The CMOs we spoke to shared that DoorDash showed relatively little sensitivity to reduced ad spend, while Uber Eats was highly sensitive to it.
The 50-unit casual concept saw this firsthand. They cut DoorDash advertising by roughly 30% while lowering their markup from 25% to 18%, yet sales stayed nearly flat as increased organic demand made up much of the difference. When the team applied essentially the same strategy to Uber Eats, sales fell dramatically. Lower pricing didn't generate the same organic lift, and reducing advertising had a much bigger impact.
The 20-unit fast-casual concept has seen a similar pattern in its own testing. DoorDash responds more heavily to pricing and marketplace positioning, while Uber Eats has been much more promotion-driven. Its team now manages the platforms almost like separate paid media channels, adjusting budgets, offers, and audiences independently.
That's a meaningful distinction as operators decide where to pull back. “Third-party” may look like a single channel on the P&L, but the same strategy won't necessarily produce the same result across platforms. The better question isn't whether to spend less on third-party overall, but what actually drives demand on each platform.
The lesson extends beyond delivery. The 400-unit QSR has increased loyalty sales while reducing loyalty spend by 25% by getting “really, really targeted about who we're giving stuff to.” Meanwhile, the 50-unit casual concept has seen loyalty ROI decline as redemption has increased and frequency softened, while straightforward meal deals have become some of its strongest traffic drivers.
There isn't a universal lever like loyalty, discounting, delivery, or even value to point to. The useful question is much more specific: What is actually changing behavior for this guest, at this location, on this channel, and is it profitable?
If there was one thing the five CMOs largely agreed on, it's that they don't expect the operating environment to get dramatically easier any time soon.
That makes learning from the differences within your own business increasingly important. Even in these five conversations, performance varied significantly from one market, location, occasion, and channel to another. One market at the 50-unit casual dining concept is growing six to seven percent while others struggle. Its redesigned restaurants are beating expectations by nearly 30%. The same third-party strategy produced dramatically different results on DoorDash and Uber Eats.
Those bright spots are worth understanding. Top-line sales and transaction growth can tell you that the business is under pressure, but they can also hide the places where something is working. The more useful question is why one location, daypart, channel, offer, or guest segment is behaving differently from the rest, and what you can learn from it.
We've seen this with our own customers. When sales declined at a particular Groucho's Deli location, the team used Bikky's AI to uncover that the issue wasn't the in-store experience or new guest retention. The decline was concentrated in lunch and digital ordering, giving the team a much more specific problem to solve.
Burgerville found something similarly unexpected when they were trying to improve their breakfast performance. Only about half of orders during the breakfast daypart actually contained a breakfast item, and its top-selling item during those hours was the Original Cheeseburger. Instead of treating breakfast as simply a menu problem, the team reframed the opportunity around driving more traffic from 7 to 11 a.m. and increased breakfast daypart sales 28% in 11 days.
Not every answer leads to a quick fix. Improving the guest experience takes more time and investment than changing a promotion or shifting third-party spend. But in an environment where broad-based growth is harder to come by, finding the parts of your business that are working and understanding why gives teams something productive to orient around.
The macro may not change quickly. But your business is still giving you signals about what's working. Finding them, learning from them, and applying those lessons elsewhere is one of the clearest paths forward.
The customer data platform built exclusively for multi-unit restaurants.