• Restaurant chains are starting to cope with the growing demand for take out orders.
• Workers say things have been unsustainable since the start of the pandemic.
• Americans are consuming significantly more food than before the pandemic, data shows.

Restaurant chains have enjoyed a huge increase in deliveries and take out orders over the past year and a half, but now they are facing a demand they cannot handle.

Off-establishment orders were key to keeping these restaurants afloat in 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic closed many dining rooms, and online orders subsequently exploded. Mobile orders drove Starbucks’ takeover and hit an ‘all-time high’ in 2021, accounting for over 25% of all orders, and at Chipotle, it now accounts for almost half of all orders. Even restaurants that traditionally focused more on on-site dining have focused on online orders, and Cheesecake Factory doubled them in 2021 to $ 3 million in sales per restaurant.

Consumers are spending a lot more on delivery, and restaurants in general, than they have in the past. They have shown a growing preference for digital controls, Kalinowski Equity Research founder Mark Kalinowski told Insider. At least 10% of American restaurants, about 100,000 or more businesses by most estimates, have closed since the start of the pandemic, so fewer restaurants are meeting this growing demand as the restaurant industry has l one of his best years in recent memory.

Part of the higher demand is that people are simply consuming more, Kalinowski told Insider. Combined food service and grocery sales, which are a close proxy for overall food purchases, are up more than double digits from 2019 levels, Kalinowski told Insider based on US Census data. . For example, in October 2021, American consumers spent 14.3% more on restaurant and grocery shopping than in October 2019.

The desire for take out and delivery continues to grow, but chains now realize that they have created more demand than they can meet with current levels of staff and ingredients. IHOP and Applebees have started shutting down delivery orders during busy weekend evenings and mornings, CEO John Peyton said.

Olive Garden and Longhorn Steakhouse, both owned by Darden Restaurants, are limiting online orders due to “excess demand,” CEO Gene Lee said on a recent earnings call. Cheesecake Factory managers now have the ability to temporarily shut down digital orders if needed.

As management is just beginning to deal with the consequences of over-delivery demand, workers are well aware of it. Restaurants are chronically understaffed, without enough manpower to meet even average demand, without additional orders this year. Some business owners say they are unable to find staff and in some cases even cite a lack of desire to work, while workers say they can demand better wages and benefits in the labor market. greenhouse. This lag has led restaurants to cut hours and close dining rooms, and a third of restaurant workers say they want to leave the industry.

These problems are at their height across the country. In mid-November, a group of five employees from an Austin chipotle quit their job, led by their CEO. They hit their breaking point as digital orders kept coming in and the manager closed the dining room in an attempt to track orders online.

Across the industry, workers told Insider they agreed those orders had gotten out of hand.

“Numerical control has been the worst thing that has ever happened to fast food,” a 20-year-old Taco Bell employee who recently resigned told Insider. These online orders can be “so ridiculously personalized,” he said, that they are very difficult to complete, arriving much faster than they can be.

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