After Years of Growth, Digital Restaurant Ordering Flatlined in 2022

With 2022’s economic challenges, restaurants’ period of unchecked digital growth has come to an end.

By the Numbers

Research from PYMNTS’ recent study “12 Months Of The ConnectedEconomy: 33,000 Consumers On Digital’s Role In Their Everyday Lives,” which draws from responses from tens of thousands of U.S. consumers, notes that ordering via restaurants’ direct digital channels — their apps and websites — has held relatively constant in the past year.

“Fifty-six percent of consumers placed food orders for home delivery via restaurants’ sites or delivery platforms in November 2021,” the study notes. “One year later, that share held steady at 56%.”

The Data in Context

This failure to increase, after years of growing digital adoption, could come in part as a result of consumers ordering less from restaurants overall.

Indeed, research from the August edition of PYMNTS’ Consumer Inflation Sentiment study, “Consumer Inflation Sentiment: Inflation Slowly Ebbs, but Consumer Outlook Remains Gloomy,” which draws from a survey of more than 2,100 U.S. consumers revealed that, in response to inflation, 78% are eating at home more.

On the flip side, some restaurants are seeing their digital ordering channels perform extremely well. Take, for instance, Hooters, which has built an almost entirely digital following for its online brands independent of its brick-and-mortar chain.

“The data that we got says about 75% of the people that are ordering from the virtuals have never ordered from the core Hooters brand, and that number shocked me from the very beginning,” Marc Butler, Hooters senior vice president of strategic planning/off-premises, explained in an interview with PYMNTS. “I was really expecting a little bit more overlap. But it seems that still, even to this day, three, four years later, we’re still attracting a new customer with it.”

Moreover, PYMNTS’ Restaurant Readiness Index 2022 Edition found that about 1 in 3 restaurants are generating 50% or more of total sales through digital channels.