MRM Research Roundup: Mid-October-2019 Edition

This edition of Modern Restaurant Management (MRM) magazine's Research Roundup features dismal restaurant sales traffic, best foodie cities , top breakfast foods in America, food fraud and why Brits love chicken shops.

Challenging Q3The restaurant industry’s sales completed the gradual slowdown we’ve been witnessing since the beginning of the year and slipped into actual year-over-year contraction. For the first time in two years, growth was negative during the third quarter of 2019 with same-store sales growth of -0.4 percent (the first quarter of 2018 at -0.05 percent sales growth can be considered essentially flat). This update comes from Black Box Intelligence™ data from TDn2K™, based on weekly sales from over 31,000 locations representing 170+ brands and $72 billion in annual sales.

There was a bit of good news amid the otherwise disappointing quarter. The trend of two consecutive months with declining year-over-year sales reversed, with small positive same-store…