While an alarming study by Lending Tree reveals that American fast food employees must work twice as long as employees of other professional sectors to buy the menus that they themselves serve, the way customers consume orders is changing in the United States. We no longer necessarily eat a burger/fries at the table, or in front of the screen of an office, but in the car. Drive to take away, consisting of not getting off the car to recover its soda and nuggets.
Except that reality exceeds the simple spectrum of fast food. According to figures revealed on the occasion of the National Restaurant Show in Chicago by Technomic, and highlighted by the Professional Media Restaurant Business, even the food turned on by restaurants with table service is not necessarily engulfed in the most obvious setting, namely the restaurant room.
Since 2019, the car consumption of snacks carried out by this type of establishments has jumped eleven points. It is the same for breakfasts (+3 points). “Food consumption by car has exploded and has not really slowed down,” said Robert Byrne, director of consumer studies at Technomic, a company attached to restaurant business.
This new habit is part of a very favorable context for take -out. In the United States, almost three-quarters of consumers order menus in restaurants so as not to eat them at their home, but outside their home. The generalization of the service in drive but also of mobile orders do not explain everything. It would be necessary to go back to the health crisis to understand how this new mania has taken off. According to this expert, consumers are used to this way of eating, when it was necessary to keep its distance to avoid the spread of the virus.
Above all, videos of influencers devouring their matcha latte, their pasta chips or their cloud bread behind the steering wheel supported the phenomenon. Since the advent of the Chinese social network, it has become very trendy to comment on quantity of food specifically in the spectrum of a car. This is the case, for example, of the tiktokeur @Keith_lee125 which has more than 17 million subscribers, but also the famous influencer Daym Drops, whose culinary wanderings have been reproduced in the Netflix series “Fresh, Fried and Crispy”.
Could a behavior that the French themselves reproduce themselves? Nothing is less certain because they are very attached to the table service, as indicated by a 2019 study of the club of the French table carried out by the CSA Institute. Almost all (96%) of respondents had said that he did not consider taking a meal without spending the table. This is the reason why McDonald’s introduced it from the end of 2016.